We shouldn't have to care who has political power

An extremely good point made by Scott Sumner:

I consider myself to be reasonably well informed. I generally know which party is in power in countries like Sweden. And yet at no time in my life could I name a single Swiss political party, or political figure. There's a lesson there somewhere. Perhaps the lesson is that you don't want to live in a country where it matters a lot who gets elected President.

Our knowledge of Swiss politics is similarly deficient. We're not even sure if they have a party political system. Yet it does have to be said that the country runs pretty well. So perhaps the agonising that we have to do over who does gain political power here is what the problem actually is. Our recent ability to chose between a scion of the haute bourgeoisie and a man intellectually bested by a bacon sandwich may not have been the most edifying spectacle, but the problem is that we had to worry about it at all.

The point about politics is to come up with some method of getting the bins taken out. And that's a reasonably simple task and one that the Swiss most definitely have a handle upon. It's also necessary to have someone called "the government" simply because visiting dignitaries expect there to be one. But over and above that the place that seems to be governed best is the one where pretty much no one pays any attention to who is governing simply because it's not very important who is. Because politics simply doesn't intrude much into anyones' life.

We recommend it as a system. Anything important can be decided by the people in referenda, there's a bit of bureaucracy necessary and then let people just get one with things as they wish. Something of a plan, eh?