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.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
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.
