EXPERT FAILURE IN THE ABSTRACT, FAILURE IN THE CONCRETE.

By their failures, argues Spiked's Fraser Myers, shall we know our Wise Experts.

As we enter 2023, we desperately need to cut the technocrats down to size. The great lie of technocracy is that the experts are best placed to make decisions in the national interest. That they somehow stand above the wayward passions of the electorate or the ideology of elected representatives. In reality, technocrats tend to simply pass off their own prejudices as superior insight.

That's the vulgar version of public choice theory. Duke's Michael Munger has thought through the vulgarities, with the following elaboration.

If Progressives understood that the politics of democracy meant that market processes were no worse, and might be better, than elections, why did they favor expanding government? The answer is that Progressives did not, do not, favor democracy, at least not majoritarian democracy. They favor the suppression of individual discretion in favor of centralized planning, government control and direction of resources, and the suppression of individual discretion.

It’s the Progressive “social contract”: government experts know what voters should want, and would want if they were correctly informed and had altruistic motives. Real voters fall short of this ideal, of course, but that’s why voters should want to give up their own power to make free (wrong) choices, in favor of a priesthood of technocrats who will run things.

In that "priesthood of technocrats" there's likely millennia of institutional memory. Did the people who were less effective fighters agree to become servants, later subjects, of the more effective fighters?  Did the people less attuned to the clues Nature provided for all to see agree to support the people more attuned as ambassadors to their gods?  In that latter post I concluded, "I might be off base suggesting that the Technocratic Vision is contrary to longer term tendencies. I suggest, however, that some organizing framework is superior to none."  Professor Munger got to the heart of the matter.  "Progressives mistrust democracy, and always have."

So it always is with philosopher kings.  Eventually even the most loyal of subjects finds it hard to square his prior beliefs with the accumulating evidence.  "Not only is Joe Biden the oldest president in U.S. history, but he has presided over a period of widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the country under Democratic Party rule."  I cannot square that "widespread dissatisfaction" with "Democratic rule".  Yes, there are compelling reasons for people of a conservative, right-populist, or libertarian bent to say the country is on the wrong track, but the very conflict within the Democrat coalition between the old school technocrats and the contemporary deconstructionists who suspect there's too much toxic masculinity in linear thinking also might be reason to venture a "wrong track" judgement.  It's right there in the Democrats' succession plans.  "But in making [Kamala Harris] an avatar of the party's future, the party has made her problems their own too, embracing box-checking at the expense of political or administrative competence."  That's being kind.  Their incompetence is their diversity.  Let us celebrate.

There is nothing funny about Joe Biden. Every day he remains in office he does incalculable damage to the country. The Biden matter is likely the least of it. He has dissolved our southern border, prioritized the climate madness, furthered the woke insanity, weakened our military, promoted a gusher of federal spending, and so on. His administration is shoddy and destructive. He is personally corrupt.

Where, though, is the message that will get him turfed out?  It's so easy to substitute "Trump" for "Biden" in that passage, and you know that the palace guard media and Donk strategists will do so.