THE CONSTRUCTED RIGHT OF PHILOSOPHER-KINGS. Blogs for Industry proposes an explanation of why academicians tend to be court intellectuals for expanded government.

American central planning will elevate people like us to the nomenklatura of planners. Roosevelt, after all, drew many of the New Deal team from Academia, and the idea of the "Best and the Brightest" running the country has been part of the post-JFK view of the Democratic party. Many of my friends have been giddy about the science backgrounds of some of the appointments, especially Steve Chu at Energy, but also the biologists who advise Obama on science.

The court intellectuals, however, often fail to make the best case for their work. Sometimes, the Philosopher King Himself also fails.

[Our President's] dripping condescension is easily missed by those who share his view of the protests and the protesters. And the way the crowd of supporters laughed along amplifies the image of out-of-touch elites who think they know better than you.

Second, his background of being from Chicago doesn't help. Face it, Chicago conjures misallocation of resources and magnified corruption a lot more than, say, the good government reputations of Wisconsin or Minnesota.

But the reaction is not even close to being just about the President. The Tea Partiers look at the stimulus and the bailouts and see misallocation of resources and magnification of corruption there as well. Incompetent reporting of "jobs saved or created" didn't help. Nor did the way health care was passed, regardless of its actual merits or lack thereof.

That's relatively tame. Legal Insurrection is more blunt.