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Comment by TehCorwiz | Hacker News Reader

The things about unelected career bureaucrats is that they usually have no legal mechanism for directly benefiting from the outcome of their policy suggestions. They can't even accept lunch from outside groups without facing disciplinary action. I would prefer those people have the power of opinion rather than someone who benefits directly or has a perverse incentive to accept "campaign money" in order to further a change in law.

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That depends. I know first hand a local bureaucrat who bought a piece of land designated as forest and a year later that forest got designated as construction area (or whatever the English term is) making that land worth at least 10x as much. And who was the person who changed that designation? A colleague of theirs in the office next doors. Quite a nice retirement gift. And those people are small fishes in a very small local community. One can only imagine how things are done on a larger scale.

You make a valid point about incentives.

What many people dislike about government in the US and in the EU is that the unelected bureaucrats tend make hiring and promotion decisions based on ideology with the result that each generation of career bureaucrats is more ideologically homogeneous and more extreme in its commitment to whichever ideology is best at spreading, which in the US and EU over the last 95 years has been Leftism.

Elections are a powerful check on this process because there isn't a similar mechanism at work in the general population of voters (or at least the mechanism is much weaker in its effects).

Also we can start to see why actors who oppose Leftism or who oppose ideological hegemonies in general sometimes want decisions to be made out of self-interest: even most zealous ideologues are more motivated by self-interest than they are by advancing ideologies. I.e., allowing decision makers to act out of self-interest is one tool in the toolbox for opposing ideological hegemony.

You're overlooking the real benefit to people who obtain value from promoting their ideology even at a government salary.

Rank and file are legally prohibited from lobbying in that way and because they're not political operatives it's actually enforced.

They don't need to lobby, because they're already on the inside. 95% of the government is run by the bureaucracy, so they can directly implement their ideological preferences. That's how you get situations like in Europe where the policies don't change regardless of which party is elected.

So how do the people effect change? As career bureaucrats generally cannot be fired, how does a government elected in a landslide make change when they only people they can solicit information from are the career bureaucrats from the prior regime?

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