One of the things I think about a lot is imagine asking an individual politician what value they provide to society: they can list work they’ve done, initiatives they’ve sponsored, speeches they’ve given, constituent interests they’ve represented, and so on.

Now imagine asking an entire party what value they provide to society: they can do something similar and talk about the good stuff they’ve done and the bad stuff from those other guys they’ve opposed.

Now imagine asking the entire representative body what value they provide to society and suddenly it gets much trickier, because they are inherently working at cross purposes to each other and most of their “work” is simply inhibition.

“As a group we’ve had endless debate, passed a bill, wrangled for a while, repealed the bill, wrangled a little more, then passed a similar but worse bill.”

There really isn’t any way to justify the existence of representative bodies as a group without saying look we’ve had five thousand years of power struggles that involved stabbings and this is a small step up from that, count your blessings.