What I really want to know is the extent to which the Bushies have purged the bureacracy and installed people who are ideologically opposed to their agencies-- or the government as a whole, really-- being able to function properly and ethically.  The political appointees can and most likely will be removed once the GOP is out of the White House (please, God, no high-minded tolerance from whoever the next Dem POTUS is!), but if the offices themselves have been structured to be useless and corrupt, then there will eventually need to be a large-scale purge, as politically risky as it will seem.  

And yes, I know this seems a bit trivial compared to the enormity of the political tasks we're facing over the next, hell, decade or two at least, but I've long thought that Dems are too likely to underestimate the GOP passion for detail, especially when they're planning for future attacks.

Isn't this really the second example, after the feds signed off on Georgia's new voter ID law despite the career staff's opposition to it?  You know, the one where the bill's sponsor said it wasn't a problem because the governor was planning to put easily accessible ID centers in every county, which was completely untrue.

If there is ever an award for best whataboutery in a blog comment, I will nominate Otto's comment here.

I would love to see a link to the survey, otto.

My understanding is that Card and Krueger showed it had benefits for lower wage workers, and that that is the general view of labor economists, but that many believe there might be other more effective policies.

Answering my own question:

From the very conservative Prof Bainbridge
http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2004/07/is_there_a_new_.html

read the whole thing, but some excerpts:

Being curious as to whether there really was a new consensus to which folks like Sowell and Neumark are just outliers, I did a little digging and came across Consensus Among Economists: Revisited by Dan Fuller and Doris Geide-Stevenson, published in the Journal of Economic Education (Fall 2003). They find a decline in agreement among surveyed economists between 1990 and 2000 with respect to the minimum wage: "It is likely that the recent research and debate concerning the effect of a minimum wage increase on employment have shifted economists' opinion toward less agreement." Yet, while there has been a shift, in 2000 a plurality of the surveyed economists (45.6%) still agreed with the statement "Minimum wages increase unemployment among young and unskilled workers." Another 27.9% agreed with provisos, while only 26.5% disagreed. So perhaps there is less of a consensus than some would have you believe

Further along...

My friend and fellow law prof Brett McDonnell writes from the frozen north (Minnesota):

(1) The statement in the J. of Econ. Ed. questionnaire simply states that the min. wage increases unemployment among the young and unskilled. It does not say anything about the magnitude of the increase. If you re-read the Landsburg piece, I think you'll see that this is an important qualifier. Critics of the old consensus would agree that there might be a small effect, but it appears to be a quite small effect indeed.

(2) The J. of Econ. Ed. article is a survey of all economists. Landsburg made a statement about a new consensus among labor economists. If indeed there has been a recent shift among labor economists (I'm not one of them, so I cannot say whether there has been or not), it might well be that that shift has not yet fully made it's way into the rest of the profession. It has started to change opinion within the full profession, but that change is not yet complete. There are a lot of specialties within economics, and it can take a while for results within one specialty to make their way into the rest of the field.

The key point being that the new consensus is that the effect on unemployment is very small, and generally more than offset by the increase in wages.

Not only do 95% of economists not agree the minimum wage is bad, fully 26.5% believe it does not increase unemployment. Wow! Otto, I think you owe the board an apology.

It's always nice to be nominated for an award. But my argument is not about 'moral equivalence' between Rs and Ds, rather that it is intrinsic to both the logic and practice of democracy that political mobilisation takes place against the views of experts and state-employee professionals. It's not a Democrat v. Republican thing. You can be sure that the Irish Green Party, the German Social Democrats in the nineteenth century, or SCIRI in today's Iraq are mobilising to disempower some state employees and snub some experts.

The 95% figure came from my memory of materials of a social policy course I took at grad school, a few years back. This is a similar survey on the effects of a "living wage"  with a massive majority of labour economists predicting a reduction in employment http://www.epionline.org/studies/epi_survey_08-2000.pdf

But if you dont like that example, and want another contemporary one, take free trade agreements. On NAFTA, the insider professionals and the economist establishment was 100% behind NAFTA - all US nobel laureates signed a letter in support - but lots of Republicans and even more Democrats mobilised against it, experts be damned. That's democratic politics. And the same will be true of the Doha round WTO agreement when that comes up for ratification.

I see your point, Honest Partisan, but as long as these professionals have a boss subject to the whims of elected politics, and there's any discretion in the decisions to be made, "undermining the people who are discharging their statutorily-determined duty" is going to be one of the things those political appointees in government departments do.

If you really wanted to try and solve this problem, you could have a government executive more like the European Commission, unelected and, more importantly, completely resistant to any form of electoral incentives. Then you would get your laws and regulations enforced without mercy to offending political interests (or with, ahem, less mercy, anyway). But it would, as in Europe, soon be widely unpopular and hard to jusitfy to those who lose from its decisions.