What the world needs now is ... Gordon Ramsey

I must confess I have not written to this blog recently. I have for about three months been successful at losing weight. While not busy all the time exercising, much of my focus has been health and not as much politics and world events. I personally am trying to find more balance in my life between the many aspects.

I have become very much a fan of the British chef and restaurateur Gordon Ramsey. While I try not to take on his vocabulary, I think the standards he displays in his line of work are something every one should admire in their own line of work. He is a poster child for excellence, and through his television shows both on American and British networks show us what we as a culture need badly to pursue. I have no idea of Chef Ramsey's political leanings and quite frankly am not in the least bit interested. He pushes himself and his employees and contestants to the brink of their ability. Couldn't we use a bit more of that?

In America he has two television shows Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen. In the Kitchen Nightmares show he examines failing restaurants and tries to find the answer to why they are failing and gives the owner guidance (sometimes very loudly) as to how to improve. In the Hell's Kitchen show he runs a traditional reality show competition where the winner usually wins a job as an executive chef in a top notch kitchen. This is where I will take this discussion. In the competition which I have only seen a couple of seasons, most of the contestants are in the food service industry, but not all. While Chef Ramsey is sometimes insufferable, his standards are always consistent and at the highest caliber.

In each season I have seen, there have been contestants that while not in food jobs at present, he recognizes their desire, hunger and hard work and keeps them in the competition until near the end. Put in a societal sense this would be the opposite of what we do in public policy. We take people that show desire, aptitude and hard work and we take from them to give to people who have show none of those qualities. Instead of giving incentive to excel and push harder we show people how to survive by doing the least effort possible.

In one season of Hell's Kitchen the chef took the player that was last eliminated before the finale and showed his opinion of her by paying for her to go to culinary school. He rewarded drive, desire and hard work. In our public policy we reward the people that achieve the least with lots of incentive to keeping achieving nothing. Make no mistake, I am saying nothing about the people on government supported programs only about the incentives we send through public policy. People receiving government aid need to rely on their inner selves for the desire to achieve and too many just don't have it. Sometimes this is because of lack of role models, sometimes because they just don't know what it is to achieve. They don't however get any incentive from our governments to rely on themselves. They only get dependence.

I suggest our politicians watch Chef Ramsey. If they don't learn anything maybe they will be entertained. In addition, when politicians aren't legislating, they can't do harm.