Fear and loathing redux
gues that
Radley Balko at Reason magazine ar
Balko’s solution to the vicious cycle is to divorce crime policy from the political process. Today, many judges and prosecutors in America are elected officials and as a result have been hijacked by public demands for tough sentencing. In most other countries, these jobs, which are technical in nature, are held by more-or-less impartial civil servants.
In any fair legal system, judges are supposed to be impartial, and so there is an argument for taking direct democracy out of the legal system. But we should
be leery of technocracy more generally. There is a danger to having too many degrees of separation between the public and its agents. While public sentiments can certainly hijack policy for the worse,
so can interests that have no accountability whatsoever to the public, with the results being systematic corruption and abuse.
In a complex society, we will always have to tread a fine line between technocracy and democracy.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user bitzcelt used under a Creative Commons Attribution License
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