when will people finally figure out that changing a guy on top of the power-structure doesn't bring about any meaningful change? We've tried and tried and still can't seem to vote in the "right people", yet so many people still cling to this idea of "if only we could vote in the right, honest and competent politicians all would be well". I'd really love to see the most benevolent and competent of all people put into positions of power, just to prove once and for all that it doesn't change anything. And they call my anarchist fantasies naive...hey those are at least something we haven't tried a gazillion times yet!
Well to be fair, a few people figured that out in the late 1700s. Even in a monarchy where the top supposedly can command anything, it is really the bureaucratic machine that determines everything. Even an economy in the late renaissance period was too large for any one king to actually understand and control. Today I don't think a president even has enough hours in a year to be briefed on all the various aspect of our economy, let alone have enough understanding to do anything meaningful. The top really only has time to implement and push through a few pet projects and almost always this expands government.
And in the US the top having very little actual control is suppose to be OK and by design. In a constitutional republic where power is balanced between the states and the federal gov, the federal level is quite limited by what it can do. So it doesn't matter that the top (i.e. the President) has little actual control,
because decision making is distributed throughout the system, and largely pushed out to local governments. This worked really well for ~100 years.
But then the federal level took a tremendous amount of power over time, however the top still has very little actual control. This is what has created today's mess where the federal government is simply out of control. The bureaucratic machine has no check against it, the states can't stop it and the President can't stop it. Which is why we are quickly moving into a surveillance police state. It will all continue until the state runs out of money, which will only happen AFTER we have all been picked dry.