While unelected technocrats are probably desirable in certain key institutions (the judiciary, the electoral system and the prosecution in criminal trials are the ones that spring prominently to my mind), I would personally prefer to avoid complete technocracy if possible.
I think that one will generally find that people become less easy to manipulate and propagandise to the closer they are to the subject under discussion. If you commute by car, it's easy to pretend that rail service gets both cheaper and better through privatisation. If you commute by train... it's a much harder sell.
So I would prefer "democracy" to be governed, whenever practical, by governing bodies representing all the primary stakeholders.
In a university setting, this works exceedingly well: Until 2003, Danish universities were governed at all levels by committees composed of equal parts students and faculty (and non-faculty staff where applicable). All of these representatives were directly elected by the people they were supposed to represent and acted very nearly completely independently of the levels above (except that on the student side we had an effective bottom-up democratic structure that ensured that the upper levels rarely worked at cross purposes with the lower ones).
Of course all of this was smashed by the Fogh I government as part of their purge of the inconvenient parts of civil society...
I think, however, that the model of limited jurisdiction, limited electorate and a high degree of independence from political bodies with a wider electorate has wider applicability than just a university setting.
Hospitals, for instance, could be run by boards where the medical staff, janitorial staff and patients (and relatives of patients), plus whatever other primary stakeholders one can identify, are represented. Either all three being co-equal in voting weight or patients (the citizens) being co-equal with the total of the staff (the technocrats), whichever seems to give the best results.
It becomes a little trickier with mass transit, electricity and other utilities which don't have a well-defined user group to represent the citizens (or where the user group is so large that it becomes co-terminus with the municipality, country, region or continent), but I am not convinced that it is fundamentally not doable.
Now, how precisely to insulate these bodies from parliamentary madness is another subject... I have a couple of ideas, but all of them basically boil down to reducing the power of parliament to regulate the workings of the state in detail, which obviously has a number of drawbacks in the event of a sane parliament.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
For instance, when Whitehall, or the French Civil Service, or the EU Commission, or the IMF, or the US government agencies... get infected with Market Fundamentalism. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
lying has always been around in artisan form, so to speak, it was after anna freud and bernays got together and mixed the potions to form propaganda to fit television, that lying became an industrial process, with every new medium since co-opted to become part of the conveyor belt of bullshit that covers most of the audio-visual sphere, with pretty much only these intertubes allowing some truths to slip through the mesh, here and there, now and then.
watch 'madmen', if you haven't, they nail the era to a T, the sleek pseudo-perfection propounded as the new 'normal', attainable one more consumer item away, a prostitution of creative imagination more cynical and sophisticatedly manipulative than anything up to then.
psychologically the outside of the box became more important than what was in it, so the ounce of flour and pinch of baking powder became 'aunt jemima's pancake mix' (value added 500%), and now we get regurgitated fascism served up brightly wrapped in gaudy packages of 'freedom brand', 'democracy-with-new-ingredients' etc.
cons have been around for ever, this was a weapon of mass destruction that was cooked up, (one part freud to two parts goebbels), as much or more than anything out of los alamos.
darkness at noon...
this was the age when brain-washing became a household word, inspired also partly by stories about oriental torture techniques designed to drive people out of one identity into another, better shaped cog. the 'twilight zone' and hitchcock's heyday provided a cultural backdrop to this mass alienation, which has now become the norm, the matrix in which we swim, the dread anglo disease... been down so long, it looks like up to me.
ronald laing saw it quite clearly, bless 'im!
george orwell saw it coming better than anyone and tried so to warn us. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
It would be farcical- as is the present situation in Italy- in which whoever arrives to power can force inconvenient autonomous personalities out of their institutional role so as to reinforce personal power. The spoils system must have limits.
In short one must create the conditions where the efficacity of power is effectively balanced by the necessity of regulated conflict between and within institutions.
Another grave problem in law-making in Italy is the possibility to make de facto retroactive laws, ad personam laws, and contra personam laws. Fortunately that does not appear to be the case in the States where constitutional change necessitates a lengthy ratification process that would vanify any personal motivations to action. Further, retroactive laws are expressly forbidden in most constitutional orders.
Thanks very much for your very interesting examples within Danish society. I might add however that the sovereignty of only primary stakeholders within a corpus excludes minority stakeholders thus laying the ground for a tyranny of the majority. Perhaps it's only a question of wording. Modern "democracy" must safeguard the rights of minorities above all.
There is absolutely no requirement in principle that the primary stakeholders represented in the governing bodies must also be the biggest stakeholders. Although of course it will be impractical to include every subgroup of a subgroup of a fraction of a group of primary stakeholders.
In fact, the entire point with this kind of devolution is to empower people who would otherwise be hopelessly in the minority. If you will permit me another Danish example, the city council of Copenhagen wants to implement congestion charges. Now, it just so happens that the mayor of Copenhagen is a Social Democrat and we have an irresponsible government. So the project gets sabotaged by Parliament - rather effectively, unfortunately.
I would argue, however, that Parliament is not the body that has legitimate democratic jurisdiction over this issue, because the majority in Parliament is elected in parts of Denmark that will feel next to no direct impact of a better regulation of traffic in Copenhagen. In effect, this is not government by the consent of the governed: It's government by the consent of the governed plus a lot of people who are only connected with the governed by the arbitrary administrative division called a country border.
To put it a bit more bluntly than it perhaps deserves, it is as absurd for people in Jylland to vote on Copenhagen traffic issues as it is for people in Berlin or Rome to do so. The Copenhagen city council isn't the most legitimate democratic body to decide the issue either, because it doesn't involve all the relevant stakeholders (think, e.g., commuters in the suburbs). But it's a hell of a lot closer.
And indeed, if you poll people I would be willing to bet a bottle of good beer that you would find that the traffic situation in and around Copenhagen is not among the top ten (or even top twenty or top hundred) issues that determine which way a voter in the other side of the country jumps. So not only do those people have no primary stake in the traffic situation in Copenhagen, they most likely cast their vote completely independently of it. That's hardly a democratic mandate in any ordinary sense of the term.
W.r.t. elected vs. appointed positions, I agree completely that what matters is that the interests of the primary stakeholders (in the above sense of the term) are protected. I merely wanted to point out that infatuation with technocracies is just as dangerous, if in different ways, as infatuation with elected bodies. I myself am irritated no end by the people who mindlessly repeat the mantra "well, s/he was elected democratically, so duh!" about some office-holder who does something utterly anti-democratic.
In fact, I had that very discussion with a co-worker about the just-former Danish minister of justice internal security. She (the ex-minister, not the co-worker) is the one who's given the Danish secret police the power to do "administrative deportations" - that is, deport non-EU citizens without trial if the secret police claims that they believe the deportee(s) to be a clear and present danger to Danish security or sovereignty. Oh, and she also gave the police the power to do "preventive arrests" - that is, round up anybody who looks like he is going to make trouble (basically this means football hooligans, communists, anarchists, Greenpeace activists and uppity brown people) and lock them up "preventively" for up to 24 hours. (And those two are just the two worst examples, there are plenty more where they come from...)
By my score that makes her just about the most undemocratic person in the Danish parliament. But "she's democratically elected, so obviously she's a democratic politician." In response to which I usually sneer something about the Hamas government being democratically elected as well.
In Italy it is a major issue. The Minister of Treasury and the parliament will block funds that are due to a city, province or region simply on partisan political grounds. A classic example is when the previous Berlusconi government blocked money that the state owed to the Region of Sardegna simply because it is run by a Left coalition, and at the same time passed an ad hoc law that rerouted identical but undue funds to Sicily to help the rightwing further consolidate its hold over that region.
Invariably these case make it to the Constitutional Court or the European Court where, after a long time, a favorable sentence to the plaintif is meted out. It is however not an effective victory since there is little to repair the damage done. Further the rightwing government steadfastly ignores unfavourable sentences. After all they needn't pick up the bill.
As far as the present situation in Italy, I will repeat that I do not consider the Italian parliament "democratically elected." Parliamentarians are appointed to office by the winning parties after a sort of beauty pageant formally called an "election."
Have the security laws you mentioned been taken to court or are they an object of a petition for a referendum to abrogate them?
Ultimately it comes down to the citizen's willingness to "Vote the Bastards Out."
