Hacker News Reader

Comment by epc | Hacker News Reader

Bureaucrats report to (mostly) elected politicians (in the US). Politicians report to the public. The public complain about food poisoning, not about 92 forms to open a restaurant. The politician tells their bureaucrats to “do something” about all the food poisoning by under regulated restaurants.

The regulatory bureaucracy is a lagging, indirect response to bad behavior by previous individuals and businesses. It’s never going to absolutely prevent bad behavior just as speed limits do not actually prevent speeding, but it is a legal tool or cudgel to inhibit the behavior and punish it in retrospect. And that in turn is both to reduce the cost of government from dealing with responses to bad behavior and ensure the politicians get reelected.

View on HN

> And that in turn is both to reduce the cost of government from dealing with responses to bad behavior and ensure the politicians get reelected.

And reduce the number of food poisoning incidents to some degree, of course.

I think that's how it should work - but unfortunately not how it does. Both Trump and Obama complained about what people would refer to as the "deep state". Here's a quote from Putin of all People describing the phenomenon:

I have already talked with one US President, and with another, and with the third - Presidents come and go, but the policy does not change. Do you know why? Because the power of the bureaucracy is very strong. The person gets elected, he comes with some ideas, and then people come to him with briefcases, well dressed and in dark suits, like mine, but not with a red tie, but with black or dark blue, and they begin to explain what he should do - and everything changes at once. This happens from one administration to the next.

I'm strangely curious about what the tie color indicates in this quote?

One guy's "Deep State" is another guys "let's protect all people regardless of their ethnicity/politics/genetics/religious faith". In a country (the US) where the executive can be elected by a minority of the population, having bureaucratic guardrails seems to be a good thing.

Also, difficult to take seriously any criticism from a guy who routinely poisons or jails his political critics or foes.

Neither Obama nor Trump had any experience managing a very large organization and it showed. Both thought they could just snap their fingers, sign an executive order, and it would just get done.

I do not think people appreciate how hard it is to get a given thing done across a large (100,000 people+) organization even when everyone claims to be aligned, everyone speaks the same language, and at the surface there is zero reason to believe anyone would act maliciously to prevent whatever "good thing" it is you want to accomplish getting accomplished. And no one, no where, is ever 100% aligned with whatever the dear leader/CEO/czar/caesar/chairman wants to accomplish.

Imagine you are a newly assigned teamlead - the projevt has an expert on databases that knows this system inside out - are you going to ignore his advice? This is exactly the same thing.

The problem is bureaucrats are unfireable. The politician can't actually make them "do something" because they lack the power to incentivize them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com