This kind of thing has always gone on wherever this is a government that can raise any revenue.

The increase of government services has not been matched by increases in oversight powers. We’re just barely starting to put information age tools to the task of keeping an eye on the rascals in Congress. That growing gap causes problems.

It seems to me that it would be nearly indisputable that we’ve never had particularly capable and/or honest people running out governments. As someone above pointed out, the far end of bell curves tends to be sparsely populated with people who have no shortage of options.

What may have been significantly different (I’ve never seen any sort of study or documentation of this) was the practice of patronage and nepotism. If the post office or the road crews or the trash collection didn’t work there was no question where the blame lay and replacing the padrone effectively replaced the next several layers.

Now we have career bureaucrats who are, to a large extent, untouchable. How far down do changes reach when we get a new POTUS or mayor, for example. Throwing the bums out has only limited effect on the machine.

All my years in the military, the legal profession (government and private) and now in big business, leave me able to say only one thing in response…. amen!

It’s good we have such people willing to serve. It is bad for the health of the republic when the one public institution which displays leadership, integrity, competence and high public confidence is your military. Not that it shouldn’t, but that in contrast to the main organs of government, it becomes a dangerous temptation after way too much self serving, dirty, petty, power hungry displays by those who parade and maneuver to control our other governmental institutions.

I don’t think the quality of governance was a lot better back then than it is now. Probably a little worse in Bryce’s time, at least as far as baldfaced corruption goes.

I don’t think it is a question of scale.

The same basic dynamic is in place. As Bagehot said in the piece I linked to, a legislature is much more than the sum of its parts due to the collective decision making process. That is the genius of a representative legislature, and the reason it can withstand a fair amount of mediocrity, or apparent mediocrity, in its leading people.

Speaking of Bagehot, he has a good discussion comparing the House of Representatives to the House of Commons. He thinks the average members are about the same, but the best rise to the top and are repeatedly trained and tested by the type of debate that is conducted in the Commmons, hence leading to superior leadership in their system. Giving due allowance for Bagehot’s pro-British bias, I think that anyone who watches the Prime Ministers questions on C-Span can agree that he was and is onto something.

Robert, I could speculate about a 30,000 person legislature, which might get us microdistricts more like what we had at the time of the founding. The bottom line is we’d have to amend the Constitution to do anything like what you are proposing and that is not going to happen because no one has an interest in making such a change and lots of people have an interest in keeping things as they are.

This is not a problem with a solution, but a permanent, structural condition.

Nor is it one that needs to concern us much.”

I agree with the conclusion but not your argument.

I think that there are MANY fine and very intelligent people in poliitics and in high office.

I think lieberman & feingold and kyl and cronyn, and rice & rumsfeld & wolfowitz and brzeshinski [SIC?] & vance & harold bown were ALL extremely intelligent. and all had very different ideologies an d successes. [ASIDE:i am a dem hawk who supports bush & co, and is ASHAMED of the dems/doves i have listed, and whom I praise as intelliegnt.]

by definition – or by “bell curve” – the MOST intelligent people are always the most rare, and they are just not going to dominate any field in which a variety of skills – and being well-rounded – is necessary.

in fields which demand intelligence and no “people skills”, very intelligent and specialized nerds will dominate.

our REPRESENTATIVES should be REPRESENTATIVE and not an elite, and they should have well-rounded lives which keep them in touch with the electorate, in literal and figurative terms.

that the 600 prominent politicians – both elected and confirmed for high office – are represntative of American “humanity”, such as it is, (and therfore contian creeps, pedophiles crooks, liars, and dupes) should come as no surprise and as no indiocator of anyithing except that our democracy works, and its checks and balances work, too.

and – as you note – collectively we benefit from the wisdom of crowds, so-to-speak.

the key to our success is two-fold: the check and balance between the branches and the the states and the federal governments – IOW: power is checked and divided.

As to how dubiously it was in our long term interest, any policy is dubious at the outset since its consequences haven’t happened yet. The arguments for the war with Spain were sufficiently compelling that the war was popular. That is about all you can ask for in a democracy.

As to how many people know what a Sunni or a Shiite I am not sure how important it really is to most people in government. I know, and I know it has no impact on anything I do. The article was written in the usual smug NYTimes fashion. I notice he did not ask any Democrats. Ha.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/opinion/17stein.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Historically, 1898 is a good example of how a few smart government employees (TR, Adm. Mahon, etc.) bullied mediocrities like McKinley into an imperialist policy of dubious long term benefit to America, a policy opposed by most of the best men of the era (Twain, Carnegie, William James, Gompers, etc.).

America’s advantage is being a continental power surrounded by two oceans. Thus our foreign policy mistakes have been less than fatal. If America was located in the middle of Europe, an incompetent like George W. Bush could be as disastrous as, say, the Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign in Germany.

Well, another 100 years and another 200 million people down the road and we’re still muddling through in the face of enormous complexities, ambitions, and dangers.

Thanks you, Cpt. Mojo. If one would like to know about the complexities, ambitiousness, and dangers of American foreign policy through our history one need look no farther than the work of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson during our birth. Or read any number of books such as A Wilderness So Immense or The Pirate Coast to name just two that leap to mind. Read any reasonably in-depth biography of any of the founders (or most any president for that matter) to learn about the complex, ambitious, and dangerous as well as the mediocrity that always surrounded them and sometimes befell them.

The short list of founders we have raised to Olympus were all great men (I challenge any of us to select one of the top 6 or 8 of our founding icons who was not indespensible) but none were infallible nor were they saints. And they walked few paths strewn with rose petals and palm fronds.

Read Frederick Jackson Turner’s collection of essays, The Frontier In American History for a taste of the shifting powers and fears and ambitions of the nation as we aged to a hundred years and a hundred million. How were we to survive the new challenges with this fragile and imperfect form of government?

BTW, thank you, Lex. An excellent topic and a very good post. This notion that some golden past with perfect people managing our America’s Cup Sloop of State is frustrating at best and infuriatingly ignorant at worst.