PUT THE LIBERTARIANS IN CHARGE.

Perhaps, if the Governance by Wise Experts part of the Knowledge System is part of the collapse, which is the simplest interpretation of "public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before," the best way forward might be to put less public trust in experts.  Here's Cold Spring Shops in October, 2016.

Joel Kotkin cautions that a bad Republican-by-courtesy presidential candidate who loses badly does not mean a mandate for more Governance by Wise Experts.  Follow both links, read and understand, and follow additional links if you wish.  Politics is downstream from culture, and it's fifty years since the Consciousness Revolution led to the destruction of presidential politics as it is currently playing out.  The correction might also take fifty years.  But there are rumblings of a correction, if you know where to look.  Thus Mr Kotkin.  "Relative few Americans have much patience with such things as “micro-aggressions,” “safe spaces,” the generally anti-American tone of history instruction whose adherents are largely concentrated in the media and college campuses. Fewer still would endorse the anti-police agitation now sweeping progressive circles."

Yes, dear reader, your Superintendent was among the observers of the political scene resigned to Hillary.  What we had to look forward to in earnest then presented as farce during the Jarrett regency.

Thus, the Fatal Conceit of the latter-day Platonists (the self-styled progressives) is in creating that cadre of Wise Experts who are going to protect the masses from their own foolishness. And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. I like the idea of limiting and enumerating the powers of government, something that neither major party shows much interest in. That way, there aren't as many things the Wise Experts can screw up, and the opportunities for those in the masses who give in to their sheer foolishness to live at the expense of everyone else are fewer.

Which for all its faults put Donald Trump back in the White House and we could sure use a chronicler like Theodore H. White to tell that story.

That's a gripe for another day.  Today we develop an assertion by Reason's Peter Suderman.  "The libertarians aren't in charge. But the lesson of the last decade of politics is: They should be."  The simplest reason might be to offer citizens a breathing spell from the dueling ukases of presidents confronting a divided government.  The deeper reason, though, is that process means the Beltway Bandits get to wet their beaks, and everybody else pays for it.

Projects took years to permit, if they were permitted at all, and were saddled with regulations that made them far more expensive to build. Meanwhile, Democratic governance—from President Barack Obama's stimulus to Biden's American Rescue Plan—has thrown trillions of dollars at projects with little to show for it.

The Abundance Agenda takes this insight and applies it more broadly to the economy, and to energy in particular. Some proponents argue that agenda is at heart a progressive project, about making government more efficient and capable of pulling off public infrastructure projects such as high-speed rail. But this abundance movement's core insights are libertarian—that material progress has been hampered by bureaucratic kludginess, government overreach, and activists using the courts to strangle projects with red tape.

Notably, the Warrenite left despises this Abundance Agenda, grousing that it's too unwilling to use antitrust to crack down on concentrated corporate power—essentially the same critique leveled at libertarians.

Under Trump, meanwhile, New Right champions of the president have struggled to defend the on-again, off-again, tumultuous imposition of tariffs. In the first months of Trump's second term, markets have repeatedly crashed, and sometimes rebounded, after Trump's tariff announcements. Trump's top advisers have offered wildly differing and often contradictory justifications for his trade policies, but few appear to agree with them, especially among nonaligned voters.

Put simply, the best thing for the experts in government to do might be to go away.  That's not as crazy as it sounds: it's a bet on emergence.  David Friedman explains.  If you know your price theory you know all this already.

All societies beyond the smallest face the coordination problem: To get almost anything done, to make an automobile or even a pencil, you must somehow coordinate the acts of a large number of individuals, arrange for someone to produce the wood for the pencil, someone to produce the chain saws to harvest the lumber for the wood, someone to produce the steel for the chainsaws, someone … . Add it all up down the branching chain and a pencil is produced by the coordinated acts of millions of people.

The obvious answer, centralized control, someone at the top who figures out what everyone should do and makes him do it, works for small groups but scales badly. The more layers you have, in a firm or a socialist polity, the harder it is for the boss to know what is being done, figure out what should be done, make people do it. The farther the boss is from the people he controls, the less likely it is that his interest is the same as theirs, hence even if he succeeds in producing the outcome he wants it may not be the outcome they want.

The alternative is decentralized coordination. Divide the problem up so each individual solves a small part of it, makes decisions close to him, ones that depend on what he knows and what he can control. The trick to making this work is to somehow set things up so that the net benefit to each actor of a decision he makes is equal to the net benefit of that decision to everyone it affects, the sum of benefits net of costs.

That sounds impossible but an ordinary free market system comes surprisingly close to doing it.

Yes, there are things that can go wrong, but a bet on emergence is a bet on antifragility.

That, what economist call the problem of market failure, is why most economists favor some level of taxation, subsidy, regulation, government interventions in the market to tweak it into doing the right thing when it would otherwise do the wrong, push it closer to coordinating to maximize the net value produced by our actions.

The argument is correct. Only the conclusion is wrong.

The mistake is thinking of the government as a wise and benevolent despot, a philosopher king, intervening to correct the mistakes of the imperfect market. The government is not a person, not something that can be modeled as a person. In a very real sense the government does not exist.

What we think of as the acts of a government are the result of the interacting actions of a large number of individuals, each acting in what he sees as his own interest, a political market like the private market but operating under different rules. Just as with the private market, to get it to produce the right acts, the acts that maximize total value to persons summed over everyone, it needs to be set up in such a way that each actor bears the net costs of his action, making his interest the same as our interest. The free market does that imperfectly, the political market much more imperfectly.

Those considerations made their way out of the common room and into common experience during the corona tyranny.

It's a lesson we have to learn every so often.  Governance by Wise Experts seemed to work to win the War, with an assist from the Axis powers getting too full of themselves.  After the War, though, it was the Wise Experts who got too full of themselves: interstate highways, limited wars throughout the Third World, urban renewal and a war on poverty.  The general problem with relying on experts is the very blinkering that makes them experts on the subjects they understand.  "I suspect, as well, that as anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and addiction are not infectious diseases in the sense of Fauci, the good doctor is less than competent to trade off those costs against the benefits of mask up, shut up, have no fun, and no holiday gatherings."  Thus, it's on whoever is making the decisions: a president, a governor, the general manager of a business, the head coach, to weigh and balance the advice of the various experts.  When that doesn't happen, it's on the people to say no.  That obligation is true whether the expert's area of concentration is national security (both Vietnam and Iraq looked like good ideas at first) or economics (rational expectations emerged as a modelling area in the wake of outcomes contrary to New Frontier hopes of fine-tuning the economy, and allocation czars never work) and Reason's Robby Soave now voices what is likely to be heresy to some people.  "Everyone has a right to dissent from the epidemiologists' contentment with the way things are now."

Citizens are not subjects, and they are not experimental animals.

Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn offers a similar rebuke of the so-called abundance agenda offering redemption to the expert classes.  It's "whatever emergence does badly, expertise does worse."

The real choice "Abundance" calls on us to make is between systems that evolve and systems that calcify. Systems that empower people to act locally versus systems that consolidate authority in the name of liberation. Systems that learn through iteration or systems that bet everything on big fixes from above.

Put the experts in charge, and the organization chart is the framework for the calcification.

"Abundance" wants to make the top-down systems we've created work better. Strong Towns often finds that these systems are themselves the problem.

A number of people have suggested to me that "Abundance" and Strong Towns are actually on the same side: both trying to clear barriers so that good things — more homes, better infrastructure, cleaner energy — can happen. That’s a generous reading, and there’s some truth in it. But the methods matter. It’s one thing to empower and support neighborhoods to grow on their own terms. It’s another to restructure governance so that neighborhoods can be overruled from afar in the name of progress.

The Strong Towns approach starts from a different assumption: that real resilience comes from proximity, not just efficiency. It’s not about empowering elites to streamline growth. It’s about creating feedback loops where those most affected by decisions also bear the consequences and have the capacity to respond.

That doesn’t mean giving more power to the loudest person at the zoning meeting. Right now, most local governments are overbuilt for input and underbuilt for action. Everyone gets a turn at the mic, but nobody feels heard. Every project, regardless of size or impact, becomes a political battle. Every reform must pass through arbitrary layers of discretion. That’s not bottom-up governance; it’s a slow-motion veto of the future.

Recognize that this reality came about as a top-down response to the federal growth and development systems put in place after World War II. Federal housing, transportation, and infrastructure initiatives of the post-war era came from an "Abundance"-like belief that society's problems could be solved, once and for all, by designing perfect systems from above.

The price theorist in me wants to quibble with the use of "efficient" in the third paragraph above.  "Efficiency" is first the identification and realization of gains from trade, which is to say an emergent phenomenon.  What the Wise Experts hope for is that their blackboard policy making is well executed and implemented effectively, you know, the Star Trek episode where the historian thinks a benevolent Führer can help a planet develop more rapidly.  Oops.

That "everyone gets a turn?"  Is it democratic or not to make decisions in the style of a Quaker meeting?  Nothing happens without consensus; thus we get peace processes that provide a lot of process and not much peace, and traffic taming that doesn't happen.

One of the clearest expressions of this mindset came from the visionary developer JC Nichols, founder of the Urban Land Institute. In the 1950s, he gave a speech titled "Planning for Permanence." In it, Nichols proposed a vision of city-building where the messy complexities of urban life could be anticipated, accounted for, and built out of existence. Where bold "men of vision" could design and build permanent prosperity using the tools of planning, zoning, and centralized capital.

That elite vision was seductive. It promised order, prosperity, and a rational end to the chaos of incremental change. It held out the hope that smart people, armed with the right tools and good intentions, could solve the many problems of urban life once and for all. But, as we have so thoroughly experienced, not only did this approach fail to deliver on immediate prosperity, it also laid the groundwork for deeper fragility.

What was built to last a century often began to fail in a generation. And when it did, the centralized systems behind it lacked the feedback loops or adaptability to repair what had gone wrong. The defensive, overly bureaucratic processes we have now didn’t emerge by accident; they are a direct response to that failure, an attempt to prevent future harm by freezing progress in place. And yet, in trying to prevent future mistakes, we’ve made it nearly impossible to respond to current needs.

Adam Smith might have cautioned about those Men of System, but he was such a fuddy-duddy.  Betting on emergence, though, is closer to giving the libertarians free rein in policy circles.  "The Strong Towns approach ... means letting go of the dream that we can get it right once and for all and instead learning to work at getting it a little more right, day after day, one step at a time."

Good.  Nearly two years into the corona tyranny came this lament.  "High Modernism, however, might have enough staying power to continue to shape the next saecular order."  That is, if it isn't collateral damage of the saecular collapse of the knowledge system itself.