De-Technocrats

Regular readers know I am fond of mocking the people who believe that, by dint of their superior ideas and morality, feel an obligation to run everyone else's lives on their behalf. I sarcastically call them the Best-and-Brightest, knowing full well they are nothing of the sort.

This conceit that smart people running society via government will work better than individual self-direction within a minimal framework that protects individual and property rights isn't new. Nearly half a century ago, Milton Friedman famously asked Phil Donahue,

And where are you going to get these angels who are going to run society for us?

Nearly a century ago, when Friedman was still a teenager, the Best-and-Brightest of the day began the Technocracy Movement, which "proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy."

The movement fizzled, but the notion of experts managing nations' economies has persisted. Even with the horrific examples of Red China, the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the more recent incarnations of central-planning failure in places like Cuba and Venezuela, people persist in this belief. At this point, the only explanation for this persistence is that human nature favors controlling others over trusting them to manage their own lives, no matter the evidence in the other direction.

Since it's unsavory to actually say that aloud, people co-opt the term "trust" in telling us that they "trust the science" and "trust the experts." They ignore that science is a process, not a thing; that experts' work product, not the people themselves, is what should be judged; and that human nature does not go away when people work for the government.

That last bit is the core of Friedman's aphorism.

Here's where it gets fun.

Trump, as he promised to, sicced Elon Musk on the government's books, to root out waste, inefficiency, misuse, corruption, and the like. Musk, in turn, gathered a group of young geniuses to pursue that goal.

Suddenly, the people who have been staunch "trust the experts" types are aghast at experts finding all of the above and more. Even worse, the decades of Best-and-Brightest running things have produced mind-boggling head scratchers as the stone-age federal retirement system and a lack of "de-duplicating" of Social Security numbers.

Major government entities like the Department of Defense cannot manage to successfully audit all their spending or where their stuff is. No one seems to definitively know how many government agencies actually exist. We've known for decades that Medicare/Medicaid loses tens of billions or more to improper payments, waste, fraud, etc, but it appears no one has put much effort into fixing that - or even tracking it down but for occasional prosecutions of the most blatant criminals.

Where have the Best-and-Brightest been all these years?

Now, we have a passel of Best-and-Brightest looking to take things in the other direction, to shrink government and find ways to save taxpayers' dollars from misuse. Think of it as an anti-technocracy, one where the smart people are government's watchdog and antipode.