that's a really interesting article 

for once I agree with the majority of posters. The sense of entitlement people have today, especially the younger generation. What's worse though is that these same people are starting to influence governments as politians spew out policies spending money they don't have in order to try and please and win the entitlement crowds votes sending us all into a downward spiral.

I'm going to agree with the many people who have said "entitlement". You do not have the right to anyone else's money unless it is freely given to you. It's one thing to be kept at a subsistence level, and quite another to be paid £30,000 a year, more than the median salary in the country, and to get it all completely tax-free. You have no right to complain when you aren't paid this much.

Also: resistance to change and new ideas. It has kept Britain stagnant for the last 20 years now, it stops both Britain and America from ever enacting proper reforms, and it's the reason people still use the Imperial system.

Professional politics is another big problem. In the words of Sir James Hacker, "you're in government, I'm in politics." The job of a minister is to remain a minister and to make people like him, rather than to actually do anything useful with the country. On the off chance that he does have a good idea, he runs into Problem 2 and goes back to subtly plotting to become party leader.

Let's try to see what the other side would be, though. If we had unprofessional politicians, that is, citizen legislators who are primarily engaged in another field of work, this would lead to:
A: A guarantee that every single politician would be independently wealthy. If you think the bias towards wealthy politicians is bad now, watch where it would go if we reduced professional politicians

B: The "special interests" problem would get exponentially worse. If somebody takes time out from a career in, say, Pork, to go do a term as an MP or a Congressman or what have you, what do you think they're going to vote for, or care about? This isn't to say that this isn't also a problem already, but a problem that would ramp up if the politicians weren't making a living off the state.

If anything, we need politicians who have the right beliefs but are otherwise completely isolated from the outside world and are utterly wards of the state. Platonic Philosopher-Kings of a sort, but this is yet more unrealistic.

A: Not really, if we have public funding for elections. Parties would still exist, they just wouldn't be made up of opportunists.

B: You would get an influx of MPs from all walks of life. Mr Pig-Seller may initially start voting for pork subsidies, but presumably that's not his only interest, and the other 599 MPs/700 odd congressmen are not going to share his enthusiasm for pork.

The "ideal solution" if you can call it that is a benevolent dictatorship where one man has all of the power, but that causes far more problems than it will ever solve.

There's really no way around having full-time politicians, because it is necessarily a full time job in our world. The citizen-legislators would at the very least have to be dependent on a core bureaucracy to do the full-time work, but then you end up with a system like Japan, whereas if you think reform moves too slow elsewhere, well...

Which brings back the point that citizen-legislators would be required to be independently wealthy (the sticking point not being elections, here), because they wouldn't have time for any sort of job without conferring a dangerous amount of responsibility on some unelected individuals.

I'm not advocating the creation of part-time politicians. Being a politician should be a full-time job, just not a full-life job. The idea is that, once you've had some experience with another field of work, you move into politics. Being a minister or Secretary should necessarily be a full-time job, and here Members of Parliament pose a bit of a problem, because they require a lot of work and achieve very little. Perhaps a much smaller house (a Senate) elected by proportional representation with a separate Cabinet would be the way to go. Local government structures could still exist.

special interest groups, politicians/politics, material possessions, personal gain, stepping on others to get to the top when you can bring them with you, the theory that people have to be Rich, middle class, and Poor to balance the financial situation of man kind, the lack of compassion, the status quo, business as usual, holding back man for an agenda that gets you further in life, the grasp for power, and the illusion that it's needed, and the failure to work together.

break the walls down, tear down all barriers, take out the establishment, speed up progress, and stop holding us back, so we can continue to move forward.

yep we are our own worst enemy.

Duck faces.

Sometimes you've got to wonder how sustainable our way of living is