The IMF was also a reasonably competent affair for a couple of decades (certainly better than what came before, not that that says a whole heck of a lot...).
Then Milton Friedman happened.
Competent technocrats are necessary to prevent insane politicians from making insane decisions in perfectly democratic ways - the iconic example is the judge who strikes down a wildly popular law as being unconstitutional.
And elected officials (directly elected officials, pretty please) are important, in order to prevent the technocrats from going crazy. The necessity of greater public accountability in the IMF being an iconic case in point here.
Whether the Union strikes more or less the right balance is a question that I really don't want to get too deep into here and now. Partly because the Union is a big place, and you can probably find examples of both excessive technocracy and excessive populism. And partly because the current subthread does not strike me as conducive to that particular discussion.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
You cannot get competence from bureaucracies unless you acknowledge that competence is possible - and indeed desirable. That's what I do. I want government to be competent. I start by making sure that the concept can exist - because it has.
30 years of Reagan, Thatcher, cronies, descendants and bastards all spewing the same lies (actually - increasingly outrageous lies, the bigger the better) have consequences. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
It cuts both ways. Sometimes the politicians have restrained neolib technocrats, and at other times entrenched technocrats have restrained neolib politicians.
In the end, the discussion of technocracy vs. elected officials is something of a sidetrack: Any sensible policy will have to be backed by both groups in order to be implemented in a concerted fashion, because both the politicians and the technocrats have the capacity to kill a policy dead if they want to.
And governments are led astray by supposedly impartial technocrats who have assimilated crazy ideas from colleagues abroad that have yet to make it into the political discourse at home.
