This is a great analogy offered by Yanis Varoufakis in So The Weak Suffer What They Must? on loc 1016:
The equivalent in the United States would have been a Washington bureaucracy, operating without a Senate or a House of Representatives to keep the bureaucrats in check, able to overrule state governments on almost anything and bent on fixing prices at levels higher than the market would have selected.
Eventually, such a bureaucracy might accept the necessity for greater democracy, but what would its implementation look like when this was its starting point?