I know that it can't be this way, because if being a career bureaucrat was the path to gaining actual power independent of being elected, and everyone was aware of this, it would drastically shift the kind of people who become career bureaucrats towards the overly ambitious power hungry grindset jackasses, but as it currently stands, with the kind of people who are motivated to take government jobs (or would have been under previous, saner administrations)? I mean we're talking experienced career professionals who chose a government job over a much better paying private sector one. Sure, the stability and security of the government jobs is probably a big factor for a lot of them, but a lot of them are also taking the lower pay because they want a job that actually serves their country/community. And even if the thing they value most is long term stability, yeah I trust those people too, because we need more people with that mindset in charge. So yeah i kinda do trust your average bureaucrat over your average politician. The only guaranteed qualification for the latter is "won a popularity contest" and even if they are qualified, look at the incentive structure! They're only incentivized to care about stuff that excites an electorate with the attention span of a goldfish! Even if they try to focus on the long term wellbeing of the country because they genuinely want to, they have to keep throwing short term, short-sighted slopulism to the masses lest they abandon the qualified leaders for some crayon-eating jackass promising to make everyone rich by refusing to pay for infrastructure and locking up minorities.
Leaders have to be accountable to do right by the people they lead, this is critical, I get that. But the great flaw with...our current method of democracy (because there is, hopefully, a better way to do it) is the way that it myopically incentivizes short-termism and clout chasing over ACTUALLY doing a good job running a country. It feels like good politicians are that way in spite of the incentives, not because of them.
If? This is picking between two shitty options; chasing clout and short term gains at best and doing long term damage for short term polling purposes vs chasing personal hobbyhorses at best and chasing nothing at all at worst.
I am not convinced that the compensation is that much worse when benefits and retirement are included in the calculation. Also historically the ludicrous level of job security/union protection, plus social/political/networking games being the actual means for advancement only matched by tenured academics seemed to attract and retain mediocrity and cultivate a lack of urgency and shits given about excellence in performance of actual job duties in government employees, which is its own type of benefit.
Stagnation is a danger ffs, and the electorate very reasonably doesn’t like overt paternalism.
Don’t be a naive child. What kind of people are going to seek out and remain at jobs with massive unexamined power, almost complete job security, extremely good benefits, but garbage pay? Certainly you’ll attract some people with specific situations that benefit, such as people who have spouses that have expensive medical conditions or lucrative but bad benefits careers, but you are also going to get a Lot of people who just want to do very little work, or who value power over pay.
Like, come on, we see this same attempt at leftlib beautification of teachers and right wing attempts with police, and yet everyone knows that actual teachers are a small percentage who actually deserve the beautification and a lot of mediocre at best, petty tyrants who are in the job to protect their own incompetence and attain power for nefarious purposes, and it’s the same story with cops. Like, the government workers we all actually meet are mostly borderline incompetent petty tyrants who are in the public sector for much worse reasons than heroically sacrificing their economic interests to serve the public.
