Here's an excerpt from fee.com which mentions several reasons why term limits are important:
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I think term limits are important in any country -- certainly in the U.S., and absolutely in a country like Argentina with its frail institutional infrastructure.
Well, I am in complete agreement that it is not a good thing for politicians to become entrenched, thereby creating a "political ruling class". The problem is, how do you enforce it without taking away other rights? Benjamin Franklin was a scary-smart dude - but in what you quoted from him, he didn't mention term limits as the way to control that process. In fact, as I remember (I could be wrong) there were no "political" salaries (or they were very small) in the US to begin with. The idea was that a person should sacrifice to be a politician, not rewarded. - which, of course, has its own problems.
I love the idea of term limitations - if they are self-imposed or imposed by the voting of the people. But telling a group of people they cannot have the representative or the senator that they want is also restricting their choices and their "speech".
As much as the founders of the US thought this way, they still didn't put term limitations in the constitution. That's telling to me - the fault lies not with the need to limit terms, but rather with government itself and the fact that it gathers power more and more every year and in controlling it by law is another way of limiting rights of the people.
Democracy (and here I refer to the method of choosing leaders for a Republic, not a wild-ass democracy where each person votes for everything, which is untenable for many reasons) requires a dedicated population that is ever vigilant, not laws to make up for the lack of vigilance of the people.
In my opinion
I think, at least at this moment in Argentina, unions are a necessary evil. And by the way, the teachers have one of the most powerful unions. Also, despite the fact that it's illegal for police (and perhaps firemen and doctors) to unionize, that wouldn't really stop them if they made the effort. The police showed two years ago what they could do when they acted collectively even without a union. The strength of any group of workers is in its numbers and in its inability to be replaced. If they organized, the government would have no choice but to negotiate with them. The government has claimed that it is impossible to have police unions, but where I come from, the police are unionized. Argentina is somehow different than the rest of the world (as has been implied by this government's words and actions a thousand times, from the cepo on down)?
I don't see unions being a necessary thing here. The overwhelming problem I continue to see is that unions are too powerful, do not include everyone and only helps the members of the unions. Police, right off the bat, don't need a union, really. The government (be it federal or CABA or what-have-you) seem to have made a back-door deal somewhere along the line with the police that they will be paid little, but can get the money and power they desire by coima and exercising control over their domain. Teachers, I know they have a union, but it's not as powerful as the truck drivers, or the bus drivers, or the train drivers, etc. Why? Because, as you mention in another part, education is not really an important thing, when you compare the fact that truckers can block food from coming into the city and teachers simply give kids time off school when they strike, where the biggest impact is parents who both work don't know what to do with their kids while they're off.
In my opinion, Argentina needs to learn more about the free market. But then again, I am very anti-union here and in the US. I come from a right-to-work state that does quite well in the same industries where other states have unions. I think it's primarily a way to elevate others above the common by force and I don't like it.
I've used the public hospitals a few times (usually for some urgent or semi-urgent problem when I can't get a turno for a few weeks through my obra social). I've had good results with one major exception.
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Anyway, despite this, from a healthcare point of view I think an older person with limited resources is much better off in Argentina than in the United States. (Although maybe I'd think differently if I was blind now and couldn't be writing this.)
BTW - if you can't go to the
guardia at Hospital Italiano with something urgent, without an appointment, you need to change your health care provider. About three months ago, I went to Hospital Aleman (have a plan there) and was quite sick. I had a bacterial infection in my lungs, seeming like just another round of bronchitis. Problem was, I really couldn't breathe. I'm not talking about the weight in the chest that something like bronchitis causes, but I was nearly having to gasp for breath. I went to the
guardia and they told me I had to make an appointment. I pushed back, politely, telling them I couldn't breath and they let me in with no problem. Turned out I had walking pneumonia and my lungs were swollen. The emergency room doctor put me on a respirator with medicine (can't remember what it's called!) for two hours to help me breath, then sent me on my way with a prescription.
In some ways I would agree with you that an older person may be better off here - and yet, I take my father as an example. He's 78. Yes, he is lucky to have decent (not great) insurance in the States, plus Medicare (which is a help for older people). He is a survivor of prostate cancer. He had a 50/50 chance to survive it. They treated him with small radioactive pellets placed in his prostrate, targeting the cancer itself. I am wondering, for example, if this treatment is available here. I know of so many people talking about having people died of cancer here, and out of a much smaller population here it seems like great percentage. In the States, I knew a few people who knew people who had cancer and/or died of it, but nowhere near the percentage, so it seems to me. Granted that is no kind of scientific study
I would have much more hope that I would be treated better at Hospital Aleman for something serious, than I would at a public hospital (at least the two that I've been involved peripherally with). Unfortunately, I don't see anything helping poor older people here at all. People in the poorer levels of society seem to have a fatal outlook, accepting that they are going to die and whatever particular illness they have often seems like the "hand of god".
I really don't know, nor do I have any way of knowing, what the quality of education is in Argentina. But:
- It's scary to think that Kiciloff was permitted to teach his theory of economics at UBA as if it were correct and proven
- The money allocated to primary and secondary schools in the década ganada has fallen far, far short of what is necessary; these schools have essentially been ignored for the past ten years. The horror stories abound; just spend a few minutes with Google.
- The number of children who neither go to school nor work (los "Ninis") has grown to epidemic proportions, creating a massive and extremely-difficult-to-solve problem for Argentina for years to come. See this from a couple years ago: http://www.lanacion....ian-ni-trabajan; and the problem has only gotten worse. In my neighborhood, these children are everywhere. I was speaking to a man working in a sanitario a couple blocks from here; he's lived in the neighborhood for 40 years, and was telling me (in Spanish), "You see all these children here on the streets, in every cuadra, every day? Many of them sitting around all day drinking beer. This never happened before. It's not normal. It's very bad. It's not normal. It's never happened before. I don't know what's going to happen. This is very bad." I have to agree with him.
100% with you on this one. I watched Cristina one time exalting the public school system here. Not long after that, two of my nephews tried to get into a public school in Jose C Paz. There was a two-year waiting time to get into any public school. And they are poor, poor, poor.
Instead, the only really good public school I know of is the one on Pelligrini near Libertador, right across from La Recova. It, too has a long waiting list to get in, but it's a "model" school.
Schooling here at the primary and secondary level here sucks for the most part unless you are either lucky or have money. And even with money you need luck sometimes...
