The Really Smart People will make everything alright | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

The Silver Lining of Technocracy

    Barack Obama has both begun his re-election campaign and signaled what his message will be: "Politics is the problem." Or, if you prefer: "Those Republican politicians are the problem." Technocracy is his solution.

    Technocracy is the idea that highly trained and skilled scientists, engineers, experts and really bright people should plan and manage everything for the rest of us. That includes things like: Health care, the environment, energy resources, financial services, creating jobs and yea, even the entire economy.

    Closer to home, it is the idea that some Really Smart People in Greenville can run our hospital better than can we.
The Silver Lining of Technocracy     photo by Stan Deatherage
    The classic depiction of the idea is the Holiday Inn Express commercial of the guy who jumps into managing a nuclear meltdown while on a tour of a nuclear plant whose qualification is, of course, that he stayed at the HI Express last night. Substitute Obama's Treasury Secretary for the guy and you get the picture of what a technocracy is all about. Obama himself is the epitome of the inexperienced brilliant mind who can better decide for the rest of us how life is best lived.

    "Technocratic utopia is of course a mirage, a supreme act of hubris, that any group of people could have the incentives or information required to manage the world top-down for us. If I told an environmentalist that I wanted ten of the smartest biologists in the world to manage the Amazon top-down and start changing the ratios of species and courses of rivers and such in order to better optimize the rain forest, they would say I was mad. Any such attempt would lead to disaster (just see what smart management has done for our US forests). But the same folks will blithely advocate for top-down control of human economic activity. The same folks who reject top-down creationism in favor of the emergent order of evolution reject the emergent order of markets and human uncoerced interaction in favor of top-down command and control."

    And from the same source, though a different posting (five years earlier): "Over the past fifty years, a powerful driving force for statism in this country has come from technocrats, mainly on the left, who felt that the country would be better off if a few smart people (i.e. them) made the important decisions and imposed them on the public at large, who were too dumb to make quality decision for themselves. People aren't smart enough, they felt, to make medication risk trade-off decision for themselves, so the FDA was created to tell them what procedures and compounds they could and could not have access to. People couldn't be trusted to teach their kids the right things, so technocrats in the left defended government-run schools and fought school choice at every juncture. People can't be trusted to save for their own retirement, so the government takes control with Social Security and the left fights giving any control back to individuals. The technocrats told us what safety equipment our car had to have, what gas mileage it should get, when we needed to wear a helmet, what foods to eat, when we could smoke, what wages we could and could not accept, what was and was not acceptable speech on public college campuses, etc. etc.

    Throughout these years, libertarians like myself argued that there were at least three problems with all of this technocratic statism:

    • You don't have the right to make decisions for other people. Period. No matter how high-minded and idealistic you want to portray it, at the end of the day you are proposing to use force to coerce another man into doing your will. You may stop them from using force or fraud against others, but an adult may make decisions for themselves, even if they are bad. I am reminded of a great line from the HBO show Deadwood, "Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?"

    • You can't make better decisions for other people, even if you are smarter, because every person has different wants, needs, values, etc., and thus make trade-offs differently. Tedy Bruschi of the Patriots is willing to take post-stroke risks by playing pro football again I would never take, but that doesn't mean its a incorrect decision for him.

    • Technocratic idealists ALWAYS lose control of the game. It may feel good at first when the trains start running on time, but the technocrats are soon swept away by the thugs, and the patina of idealism is swept away, and only fascism is left. Interestingly, the technocrats always cry "our only mistake was letting those other guys take control". No, the mistake was accepting the right to use force on another man. Everything after that was inevitable.

    Click here to go to the original source.

    So how is that Technocratic Hope and Change working out?

    And by the way. The last time the Technocrats ran a country it was known as the Union of Social Socialist Republics. The most recent one was the last meeting of your local Homeowner's Association or local Planning Board. Same idea, different sand box.