I don’t think there’s a much better illustration of the problems with technocracy as a governing principle than the stimulus package that’s making its way through the Congress right now. I’d summarize that as lawyers who’ve been elected to public office making decisions about economic strategy and construction priorities. Here’s what the civil engineers have to say on the subject:
“Unfortunately the approach is a quick fix, and it’s what we’ve been doing for decades. It’s a patch-and-play approach to solving our infrastructure needs,†says Pat Natale, executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers, who supports a mix of shovel-ready and longer-term projects. “We need to come up with an overall plan to handle all of it. If there’s congestion somewhere, look at the transportation needs. Maybe that means putting in more transit lines or light rail. What is the overall plan for transportation in that region, not just in that municipality?â€
Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds
The article also makes the point I’ve been making around here for some time: this ain’t the 1930’s.
“In developing countries, there are roads that are so bad, they create congestion, because drivers are constantly forced to slow down,†says David Levinson, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s civil engineering department. “That’s not the case here. If the road’s a little bit rougher, drivers will feel it, but that’s not going to cause you to go any slower. So the economic benefit of those projects is pretty low.â€
That might be acceptable to people focused purely on fostering rapid job growth but, ironically, such stimulus spending could fall short on that measure, as well. “In the 1930s, when you were literally building with shovels, that might have made sense. That was largely unskilled labor. Today, it’s blue collar, but it’s not unskilled,†Levinson says. “The guy brushing the asphalt back and forth is unskilled, but the guy operating the steamroller isn’t. And there’s an assumption out there that construction workers are interchangeable between residential and highway projects. But a carpenter isn’t a whole lot of help in building a road.â€
To most lawyers technocracy seems to mean putting lawyers in charge of everything. A Congress composed mostly of lawyers is not the Congress the Founders envisioned, it’s not serving us particularly well, and, unfortunately, there’s no practical way to change it.
That pretty much sums up the main problem I have with the stimulus package. They realistically need to separate the state aid (Medicaid and otherwise), Unemployment Insurance funding, and certain tax cuts into one package – and the long-term stuff into another package.
Hell, they ought to be planning the Long-Term Package right now, getting reports sent out and ready on how implementation of infrastructure improvements and alternative energy might go down. Instead, they’re trying to rush everything at once, in part because Obama and Congressional friends are feeling the urgency (and probably doubt they can get a separate Long-Term Package passed), and in part because the US President is limited in his power over the Domestic Arena of American Politics and has to humor Congress.
I agree with Brett.
Now about this lawyer-bashing, Dick the Butcher stuff . . . Every time I watch a Senate confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court appointment, I wonder if any of these people ever practiced law. We have approximately 60 lawyers in the Senate, but some like Byrd and Schumer never practiced law for a single billable hour. Some like Obama practiced about a year or two (spread over several). I believe Durbin started out as a lawyer to Lt. Governor Paul Simon. A lot of Senators appeared to have worked a few years for the government, in either the prosecutor’s office or the public defender’s, before going full-time into politics.
I suspect you might have it backwards in your critique. I think a lot of people who want to be involved in politics get a J.D. as a title of distinction. They have little interest in being lawyers, beyond the extent to which public work would give them the attention to win a first election.
As for lawyers we only have so many professions. We’ve had some doctors in the Senate, not exactly stellar most of them. (Frist, anyone?)
PD has it right: a law degree is just about getting your ticket stamped as you move into politics.
You could say the problem is that we have too many professional politicians in Congress but who else would take the job? It represents a major pay cut for most successful professionals, you give up privacy, you give up your freedom, you end up doing cross-country commutes, you work insanely long hours and most of that is spent kissing ass for money. I mean, maybe if you’re a proctologist you see it as a career step up, but really, why would any rational person give up a successful career to join that low-pay, high-stress circus?
I don’t recall which Federalist number it was (I’ve cited it around here before) and rather than looking it up I’ll just quote it as close to verbatim as I can. In answer to the question who would serve in Congress, the answer was something to the effect of landowners, merchants, and members of the learned professions.
We no longer have an economy based on land. I think today’s analogous answer would be businessmen.
What we have now is almost exclusively lawyers. They’re tremendously overrepresented.
I don’t have any particular problem with lawyers. I’d have a problem with a Congress completely made up of doctors or engineers or economists or poli sci majors or architects. I think that this is just one of the ways in which Congress needs to look more like America rather than looking like the American Bar Association.
I think, ideally, that serving in Congress shouldn’t be a career but that a term in Congress should be the crown on a successful career in law, medicine, business, engineering, teaching, what have you. Since I think that’s the ideal I also think that things that move us closer to it are good, farther away, bad.
Where are our laws created. What advantage, educationally, would a degree in law give someone interested in public service?
I can understand that having a degree in law would be an advantage for a lawmaker, after all, wouldn’t we prefer that our Senators and Congress folks have the skills and knowledge of the language of law?
Any lawyers out there…is becoming a lawyer just about memorizing and learning laws, or is it about the language of law..a bit simplistic, but the point is there…perhaps they should have refresher courses in the art of law…then we might have less garbage in our bills…more clarity, less deception slipping through in our laws, fewer loopholes…perhaps..
There is a saying in law school that A students become law professors, B students become judges and C students make all the money. That is a way of suggesting that law school provides a body of knowledge that is not imperative to the practice of law. Until the 20th century, law was generally learned as an apprenticeship.
There was a higher percentage of lawyers at the 1787 Constitutional Convention than in the Senate today. But a number of these people had occupational backgrounds like lawyer/architect/naturalist/political philosopher/landowner. Many also served in the war or in the militia. As I see it, the Founding Fathers were largely lawyers in the sense they were using their legal skills to draft the Constitution, but they were people of much greater diversity of experience than we have today.
To the best of my knowledge the only one of the Founding Fathers who was unquestionably a lawyer was John Adams. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe all read law but were basically landowners. Alexander Hamilton read law but was basically a banker. George Mason, acknowledged by his contemporaries as the best-educated of the bunch, was a landowner and was entirely self-educated.
Being a lawyer as a career today is completely different from being a lawyer as part of being an educated man was in the 18th century. Our lawyers in Congress today are mostly career bureaucrats, apparatchiks, and politicians. That’s why I believe in term limits and that we should amend the Constitution accordingly.
If I were king I’d institute a strict “up or out” policy in the Congress. One term in the House and either you’re elected to the Senate or you’re out. One term in the Senate and you’re out.
While it always sounds good to have virtually no re-election in the Legislature, I’m skeptical of its usefulness from looking at states that have term limits (like California), or from countries that have them (like Mexico, which allow for no re-election to any federal office). You get a cadre of inexperienced legislators who have no incentive to get good at their positions, and every incentive to simply extract as much as they can while the getting is good. In the meanwhile, they’re generally incompetent at getting legislation moving.