Unelected Bureaucrats
What do they know?
Long ago my Dad complained about road workers who used long handled shovels. That symbolized for him lazy bureaucrats having it easy on the public dime.
Now truth be told - long handled shovels are much more efficient to use. Short handled shovels are good if you need to be digging a slit trench but not so good if you need to shovel gravel into a ditch.
And its probably true that the workers did lean on their shovels as they waited for the next dump truck to dump.
But is that efficient or inefficient? I say it's efficient because then the workers could get to work on the load as soon as it was dumped.
A fire department has to have a lot of highly skilled people sitting around waiting for a fire to happen. Firemen aren't productive at every moment.
When I worked in the printing industry I had to fill out timesheets that accounted for every moment. I had to be demonstrably productive from the moment I walked in the door till I left.
One of my jobs in the printing industry was running paper cutters. These were big machines that could cut through a 6 inch stack of paper with 1/1000 inch precision. The blade was very sharp. The machine could cut your hand off at the wrist without a pause.
Unelected bureaucrats decreed that those paper cutting machines had to have two buttons to activate a cut - that is - both hands needed to be pushing buttons so they were out of the way of the blade as it cut.
I worked for a guy who turned off that safety mechanism. I needed the work and worked with it till one day one hand hit the cut button while the other hand was in the way of the blade. I jerked that hand away and the blade literally shaved the hair off my fingers as I jerked them away.
I think a bureaucrat should have been inspecting the machine so that my boss couldn't have done that. I don't think it would be good if that bureaucrat was elected. I think Plato long ago noted that elections choose those who are popular and not those who are qualified.
He was a wise man and he raised a good point.
In Plato's time objective qualification was a dream based on fantasies about gods. Not based on experiments that demonstrates which approach works better than others.
Times have changed. Collectively humans possess far more knowledge of the real world than any one person could encompass. When I was a printer I was an expert of sorts. I knew my job better than the boss did and generally I'd be just left to get on with it. A micromanaging boss has an inefficient shop.
I'm not sure if the ancient Greeks had anything like what we would call bureaucrats but I have my doubts. The king might have a staff but nothing like a department of health.
Canada has a department of health. I bet every modern country does. A department of health is full of bureaucrats who are expert in all sorts of things from medicine to law to finance. When the department of health needs a new hospital they hire outside experts to build it.
None of these people are elected to their position. They are hired and retained because of their special skills and knowledge.
In democratic societies people elect legislators of various sorts. They act as a sort of boss of the bureaucracy - giving the bureaucracy direction and supervision. But for most things the legislature just has to let the bureaucracy do its thing because the legislators don't have the specialized knowledge.
The bureaucrats do have a lot of power in practice. They are the ones who make and enforce regulations that people have to obey as if they were laws and the people whose activities get regulated are often resentful - who elected this person?
The irony here is that people's lives are affected far more by private business than by government regulation. Like I bet people whose water gets polluted by fracking wish there was more regulation of that industry. And the frackers wish there was less.
If I recall correctly, legislators approved public health regulations recommended by public health bureaucrats like Dr Fauci. These were pretty extreme and unpopular - like lockdowns. But the government stepped up with many levels of financial support that kept the economy going. And I bet that those support measures were proposed by unelected bureaucrats.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.