Join the new world

This article was meant for something else on another time, but I decided to publish it right now. I thought about it a lot and thanks to Walhallah opening the debate about something like this, I thougt, let's publish it right now. I recommend you to read the article of Walhallah "The Big Picture" first: http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/2524510/1/20 before reading mine. Also keep an eye out for the debate about this in congress if you would like to be up to date. My article is not a reaction on the article of Walhallah. It's written before I read his article (except for this part and the conclusion), so I won't link to anything he said, but I think I'm giving my opinion on some of his questions he raised. I hope this article will contribute to the debate.

Thanks to game mechanics we will always pay more attention to situations and ideas on the short term. After one month we have a new government with new plans and ideas and they stop with the policies of the past governement and even sometimes they undo the work of the previous government. We lack consistency and some would say, we can't do anything about it. That's how the game works, deal with it.

But how are we dealing with things that are important on the long term and can't be handled on the short term? Like for instance our foreign relations. It is almost impossible to have every month new allies and build relationships over and over again. What is the solution? There isn't an intentional solution I think. The problem almost fixes itself. For these kind of things (finance, FA) the most governments choose experienced players who were already in place in the previous governments. Take for example a closer look to FA. Willem the Conqueror, our new SSoFA of Kodak II, is more than a year now part of the FA team without a break. Why do our presidents choose for these people? Probably because they have experience the presidents need to run the country smoothly. At the same time, it helps our policies who need consistency and stability on the long run. The long term aspect in appointing those experienced candidates also plays a role. We need a stable MoF to manage our money, so that's why we have almost always the same person on this position (and it's also extremely boring and there are only a few people capable of doing this).

So, there isn't much of a problem it seems. We have a long term policies where we need it most and short term policies for things like immigration, recruitment, education and defense. But what if we want to make plans for these ministries for the long term? This is very difficult, and I think even impossible. This depends on the next president and if he is willing to continue the long term programs of the previous governments. As a president, you have to convince your successor to continue your programs. All presidential candidates tend to convince voters with promises to change things. They can't change long term policies, so of course they will take every opportunity to change the short term policies to get more voters. But what does this exactly mean?

We see a lot of innovation. There are very good ideas on the "short term ministries" like defense, recruitment, information and home affairs. Every term we see new ideas, because old ones were stopped to make place for new ideas. Is this a situation we want? Almost every idea will fail, because there isn't enough time to see if it works. The only ideas that'll work are ideas implemented by congress, or by a dedicated person who is several months in the government trying to implement this.

What do we want? Do we want to continue this situation? An option is to institutionalize policies. I don't know if this is done in the past, but according to our law book (which has a chapter dedicated to this), it was (I would love to know more about our previous thoughts about this). In practice this means something like:

1. The government comes up with a plan for a ministry which is suppose to last more than just one month.
2. The goverment proposes the plans to congress
3. Congress decides if the plan is good enough and votes on it.
4. The next government is obligated to work with the plans of the previous government.

This would be one of many possibilities. But there are some problems here. It is not desirable to make the government do things they don't want to do. So congress shouldn't allow every policy to be a long term policy. So not every good idea should be institutionalize imo if it will have negative influence of the work of the government. Those institutionalized policies are a huge deal for those governments. There should be a more than normal majority in congress for plans like this. If the people of the Netherlands decide it's a plan we want in the upcoming months, only then we should institutionalize it. Maybe even with a trial period and a time limit.

But as I said, there are some problems with this. We won't have as much innovation as we have right now. The CP candidates can't innovate as much as they do right now. They can't win votes to promise nice ideas (or they do, but these promises will be broken) anymore. The government also has to do more work if they have their own plans.

I don't know about this. I think we should do something like this, but I would like to see some more ideas. This article is primarily meant as contribution to the debate Walhallah started with his article: http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/2524510/1/20.
In my opinion we should do something to ensure long term policies in ministries where it is almost impossible to have them. The only doubt I have is the loss of power of the government, which will be a problem for a lot of people (not for me).

Spir Tus
A Bastion of Truth