From the New York Times:

A onetime engineer turned Goldman Sachs executive, Mr. Kashkari never had strong partisan instincts. Instead, following his boss Henry M. Paulson Jr. to Mr. Bush’s Treasury, he took along Wall Street’s disdain for the culture of Washington.

As the crisis in an over-leveraged financial system crested last year, that skepticism led him to question the wisdom of seeking bailout money from Congress; he feared that lawmakers would say no and trigger a catastrophic loss of confidence. But lawmakers surprised him, as did the civil servants at Treasury and the Federal Reserve that he calls “patriots” for their frantic efforts to avert disaster…

Washington’s economic bureaucrats may be patriots, but Mr. Kashkari does not see his onetime Wall Street colleagues that way. “No, they’re not,” he said. “I don’t expect every American to be a patriot. I do think Wall Street firms need to show more sensitivity.

“Every single Wall Street firm, despite their protest today, every single one benefited from our actions,” he said. “And when they get up there and say, ‘Well, we didn’t need [the $700 billion bailout],’ that’s bull. They did need it. And they’re all happy with the actions that we took, and they need to show restraint today.”

Kashkari is not alone in his surprise at the quality of civil servants. It’s common among private sector executives who assume that ability and intelligence are linked to how much money you can manage to get out of other people’s pockets. A few other examples on this point:

…From a 2000 profile in the Washington Monthly of former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin: “Who else would approach Rubin’s credibility when they argued, as he does, that the talent he served with in government matches or exceeds the talent he saw during decades at Goldman Sachs?” (Reagan’s treasury secretary, Don Regan, also discovered that his new employees were just as good as the ones he had supervised as head of Merrill Lynch.)

…From an August profile in the New Yorker of Michael Bloomberg: “[Mayor Bloomberg] also told me that he has consistently found the quality of government employees to e higher than businesspeople generally allow.”

…After spending 16 years as a federal civil servant, ending as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Paul H. O’Neill ran International Paper and then the troubled Alcoa Corporation — which he turned around through his emphasis on long-term planning, worker safety, eiminating executive perks, using productivity gains to retain rather than to fire workers, and keeping prices stable.

…And in 1997 the New York Times recounted the surprise of catalog companies on discovering that the U.S. Postal service did a first-rate job of taking over from UPS when the company was shut down by a strike.

All right, enough of that. I’ll only add that I’ve worked as a junior executive in a midsized private bureaucracy (the Washington Post) and very near the top of large public ones (the White House and the Federal Aviation Administration). In my experience the quality of senior management was markedly higher in the government.