Civilian Control

A brilliant insight from Bill James at Bill James Online which is not surprising since Bill is the brilliant godfather of SABRmetrics and advisor to the Boston Red Sox.  In response to a question from a reader he writes:

I think public skepticism is fundamentally a positive and is always a positive. It seems to me that you're assuming that experts have no agenda. In most cases, in most areas, experts DO have an agenda, and what the experts tell the public is almost always filtered through their agenda. Among the great successes of America has been the universal acceptance of the concept of civilian control of the military, because the generals--while they are indeed the experts on war--always have an agenda, whether that agenda is creating a war or avoiding one. Among our greatest failings is that we have not generalized the concept so that we realize that, for the same reasons, we need civilian control of the education system, civilian control of the police, and civilian control of the legal system. If you let educators run the education system, you wind up with a system that works well for teachers and college professors. If you let lawyers run the legal system, you wind up with a system that works very well for lawyers.