‘Ratty’ public servants

Representative democracy is about people hiring others, delegating power to them and having them run affairs on their behalf. Therefore, the people are owners and those hired are their servants.

However, it is not uncommon for those servants to ignore their masters and act as if they know the best in government affairs and in the National Assembly. Besides, it is a betrayal of trust to see these servants compare their masters to beasts and mock them. The violators get away with apologies or some public drubbing. In some extreme cases, they are removed from their jobs.

But surely they deserve much tougher penalties. More broadly, do we need to adopt a system to select people more suitable for public service or weed out the bad prospects or poor performers?

For that, we the owners should first get angry with these perpetrators who are like rats, pigs or dogs and amount to less than menial workers. Here are three cases.

“People are like lemmings,” a provincial councilor said recently after taking a public drubbing for pressing ahead with a taxpayer-funded overseas trip despite a flood buffeting his province. Now, Kim Hak-cheol, a member of the North Chungcheong Provincial Council, has refused to apologize.

Na Hyang-wook, a senior official of the education ministry, last year compared people to “dogs and pigs” for which the government’s only job is feeding them. During his dinner with reporters, he also said these “animals” accounted for 99 percent of the population.

Lately, Rep. Lee Un-ju of the People’s Party came under fire for cursing school cafeteria workers who were on strike demanding they be put on regular payrolls.

It may well be time to consider whether it is appropriate to increase their numbers as the government plans to do, or reduce them. Slashing the number of lawmakers or abolishing local councils should not be ruled out. They should know who the boss is.