Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
Does it matter to pro-governmental regulation people that regulators are not affected by the vote? Politicians aren't regulators. They only have marginal influence over the agencies. The vast majority of regulations are designed and administrated by the unelected. This is true on the federal and the local level.

It seems to me that the reason many people support government involvement is because they think the involvement comes at the hands of elected delegates. It does not. When politicians say bad things about bureaucracy, it's not because they're in the pockets of name-your-villain, but because bureaucracy indeed wields tremendous undemocratic power, antithetical to what the voters say they want.
Just like all decisions in any larger company are not made by the CEO, they're delegated down the chain, same as in a bureaucracy. Politicians make laws and government officials make regulations based on them. In many models the politicians do have a lot of say on the appointing of those higher level officials. Then again the officials are often also handy targets to put the blame on, when the politician's policies fail to work as expected.

But again, all of this is nuance and could be organized in many different ways.

One suggestion I have is that there should be no such thing as a career politician. All political offices should have maximum terms, just like the president (this could also be interesting to implement for CEOs). If 1 term was the maximum, there'd be no need to use half the term worrying about votes and fundraising for the next elections, but to actually get things done. Politician wages could be even higher to make them lucrative against top level private sector jobs, to get the brightest minds in instead of ex-athletes and quasi-celebs. But I digress.