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by _heimdall 483 days ago
There's a good argument to be made that the role of bureaucracy in our government is to intentionally slow down change and even out the peaks and valleys as administrations change.

I'd be worried about the Chesterton's Fence problem when removing bureaucracy simply because we don't like that it gets in our way.
1 comments
rayiner 483 days ago
That’s not a role the framers ever envisioned, and it’s a bad thing to have in a democratic system. The government should be responsive—voting should result in visible changes to the government. A lot of the current polarization is due to the fact that people have been voting against globalization since 2008 and somehow we keep getting more of it. It’s dangerous in a democracy for voters to perceive that elections are just a suggestion to the bureaucracy that actually runs the country.

It’s also incorrect to assume that the bureaucracy averages out to the same place as the public. Public support for increasing immigration, for example, peaked at 35%. It’s never been popular. But we have been getting more of it for decades: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...

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_heimdall 483 days ago
That's a tough comparison to make. The framers lived in a drastically different world with regards to the size and scope of the federal government.

They design a federal government that was purposely hamstrung by the states. It was poorly funded, had no standing military, only briefly had a federal bank, and had very limited purview of authority that didn't fall down to the state level.

If we want to remove bureaucracy while also rolling back many of the federal powers created over the last century or so I'd be all for it.

Removing one without the other either seems pointless (bureaucracy without authority) or risky (authority without bureaucracy) in my opinion.

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rayiner 483 days ago
> That's a tough comparison to make. The framers lived in a drastically different world with regards to the size and scope of the federal government.

That makes it more, not less, important for that expansive government to be highly responsive to elections.

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_heimdall 481 days ago
Why is that? My statement was on the scale of centuries not 4 years

For what reasons should the government be expected to shift dramatically every election?

Personally my argument would be that the government's authority should be limited enough that it doesn't have to change very much every election.

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