You cannot serve those you loathe. And bureaucrats loathe us. - Granite Grok

You cannot serve those you loathe. And bureaucrats loathe us.

bureaucratIn the free market, if you do not serve your customers, you’re history.  The accountability is via Profit indicator: if you are not selling something that works, your profit will suffer.  Price your offering too high, people will not buy and your profit will suffer.  Price is too low and be unable to recoup your costs and be ready for the future, your profits will suffer.  Accountability via the Profit mechanism will and does cull the weakest. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to keep the Public Sector accountable and a recent study has shown that disdain reigns supreme when the “Governing Class” is queried about their thoughts on those they are supposed to be “serving” (emphasis mine, reformatted):

Recently, Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg conducted a study of the unglamorous D.C. bureaucrat. These are the people who keep the federal government humming — the Hill staffers, the project managers and all those desk workers who vaguely describe themselves as “analysts.” As Bachner and Ginsberg argue, civil servants exercise real power over how the government operates. They write and enforce rules and regulations. They might not decide what becomes law, but they have a hand in how laws are drawn up and how laws are implemented.

This is the Administrative State of which I write often.

For all their influence, though, nearly all of these technocrats are unelected, and they spend most of their time with people who are just like them — other highly educated folk who jog conspicuously in college tees and own a collection of NPR totes. In their new book, which is part ethnography and part polemic, Bachner and Ginsberg argue that Washington’s bureaucrats have grown too dismissive of the people they are supposed to serve. Bachner and Ginsberg recently sent around an informal survey to selected members of this technocratic class, and the results, they say, were shocking.

Many civil servants expressed utter contempt for the citizens they served

Many civil servants expressed utter contempt for the citizens they served,” they write in their book, “What Washington Gets Wrong.” “Further, we found a wide gulf between the life experiences of ordinary Americans and the denizens of official Washington. We were left deeply worried about the health and future of popular government in the United States.”

…Nevertheless, the results they present are eye-popping. On a wide range of issues, bureaucrats believe that Americans are ignorant. For instance, over half of them say that the public knows little to nothing about government crime programs, child care programs or environmental programs.  Predictably, the bureaucrats also think that the government should not take what the public says too seriously. Mostly, they believe that officials like them should use their best judgment instead of following public opinion.

Which means that our government By the People is becoming BY THEIR KIND OF PEOPLE.  After all, the Executive Branch agencies can make their own regulations with the force of law, create their own fines structure, prosecute “crimes” against their regulations, and adjudicate them in their own “administrative courts”.  Again, our Constitution created a government of divided branches each with their own powers and responsibilities.  The current state of our government structure is not what we fought a war over.

And here is the media, as the Washington Post is about as Progressive as the MSM gets, cheering them on:

A lot of this elitism is probably justifiable. When only 36 percent of adults can name the three branches of government, you wouldn’t want to hand over control of FDA to, say, your next-door neighbor. In the sample of bureaucrats that Bachner and Ginsberg looked at, the majority had master’s degrees or more. It should be a comfort knowing that there exists a specialized class of people who have dedicated their lives to understanding the intricacies of, say, tax credits for the poor or the diplomatic intrigues of the Caucasus.

Well, the justification by Progressives is that the Administrative State is to be made up of expert technicians.  But it is also the second part of their premise that is highly problematic: that they should also be strictly non-partisan.  As we have seen, on steroids, nothing says Partisanship as the Obama Administration.  The author has the right of it:

Bachner and Ginsberg don’t dispute that many voters are ignorant. In their view, however, D.C. insiders are needlessly disdainful of the regular Americans they are supposed to be helping and that this breeds distrust on both sides. Perhaps that’s one reason, they say, that American faith in government is at a 50-year low.  “Ordinary folk might not know a lot, but that’s not an excuse to ignore them,” Ginsberg said in a recent phone interview.

Bachner and Ginsberg call this phenomenon the fallacy of “false uniqueness.” They interpret it as a sign that many public servants have internalized a sense of superiority. Perhaps, as they write, “officials and policy community members simply cannot imagine that average citizens would have the information or intellectual capacity needed to see the world as it is seen from the exalted heights of official Washington.”

 

The public servants should be serving the public – and not consider them the Public’s Masters.

(H/T: Instapundit)

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