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Maybe the point of having legislators is to make decisions that improve people’s lives, and so maybe you need someone whose primary loyalty is to the people (or

• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Maybe the point of having legislators is to make decisions that improve people’s lives, and so maybe you need someone whose primary loyalty is to the people (or at least, to the people that vote) to synthesize the advice of the experts? Loyalty and expertise are orthogonal, and loyalty without expertise is fruitless. Good intentions are insufficient for good results. > Or to put it another way, maybe you need an expert in figuring out what the public wants to synthesize the advice of the other experts? Sure, “understanding the public interest” is one of the domains of expertise involved in public policy (whether it's the most critical for politicians to have personally as decision makers might be debatable, it's certainly not one in which they are typically undersupplied with advisors whose notional role is providing expertise; indeed, these usually, for legislators, significantly outnumber advisers with any other even notional domain of expertise other than law and dealing with other legislators.)