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Chris Anderson

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We need a political party devoted to maximizing the value of people's TIME.

Most of politics is about money. "It's the economy, stupid." But as the world gradually (painfully) gets wealthier, we're discovering what we should have known already: that money does not buy happiness. The resource that matters far more than money is time. All of us, rich and poor, only have so many hours, so many years to live, to love, to enjoy our lives. A political party whose stated goal was to honor the peoples' time might be on to a winner. Instead of its obsession being the eternal growth of GDP (and all that ultimately means in terms of planetary destruction), it would obsess about reducing the amount of time stolen from us by government departments, bad urban planning, taxation form-filling, health system complexity,complexity generally. "This year, your government is proud to tell you that it consumed 1 billion FEWER hours of our citizens' time. Thank you and good night."

It's time for the Time Party!

Topics: economics politics time
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    Radix Hidayat 500+

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    Feb 15 2011: Fortunately for you, we in Indonesia are still battling for poor public service, slow administration (even for making ID or driving license). Some of the politicians has launched bureaucracy reform, but to me, it's no more than meaningless slogan. It's been a public secret that the bureaucrate have a creed: "if we can make it difficult, why make it easy?". Because the officials has power to "slow down" the administration, they, in some ways, can extort money from you to make the process faster. It's not fair at all.

    I agree that time would be the ultimate resource in the future. It can't be stored, it can't be bought. But In Indonesia, it's still a long way to go. First, we need to tackle down those corrupt officials, making bureaucracy reform (with the techies, of course). And uniquely in Indonesia, we don't need that kind of party. We just need visionary leaders that believe in the importance of time and can change the administration he is supervising.

    Just my 2 cents

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