Figure 24

The military is typically allowed substantial autonomy with regard to operational matters. And, as the world has come to know through the revelations of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency has been given broad leave to collect data not just on foreign activities but also on American citizens since September 11, 2001

While many American libertarians and conservatives would like to abolish these agencies altogether, it is hard to see how it would be possible to govern properly without them under modern circumstances. America today has a vast, diverse, complex national economy, connected to a globalized world economy that moves with extraordinary speed and that takes a great deal of expertise to master. It faces serious external security threats. During the acute phase of financial crises that unfolded after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department has to make massive decisions literally overnight, decisions that involved flooding the market with trillions of dollars of liquidity, propping up individual banks, and imposing new regulations. ...... There has been a large amount of after-the-fact second-guessing specific decisions made during this period. But the idea that such a crisis would be managed by any other branch of government - and particular by Congress, exercising detailed oversight is ludicrous. The same applies to national security issues, where the president is in effect delegated to decide how to respond to nuclear and terrorist threats that potentially affect the lives of millions of Americans. It is for this reason Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70 spoke of the need for "energy in the executive."

There is intense populist distrust of elite institutions and demand either to abolish them (as in the case of Federal Reserve) or to open up their internal deliberations to television and public scrutiny. Ironically, however, Americans when polled show the highest degree of approval precisely for those institutions -- the military, NASA, the CDE -- that are the least subject to immediate democratic oversight. Part of the reason they are admired is that they actually get things done. By contrast, the institution most directly accountable to the people, the U.S Congress, received disastrously low levels of approval (see figyure 24). Congress is typically regarded as a talking shop where only lobbyist influence produces results and partisanship prevents commonsense solutions. ~ Page 489