– By Henry Oliner at americanthinker.com
We expect those in government to know how to get things done. They need to understand organizational and political behavior, effective administration, and how to comply with the law.
We do not expect or want elitists and moral supremacists who believe that they know so much more about justice, the market, and how we should live. In his recent book Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell explains how the "anointed" believe that their advanced education and depth of knowledge in one field automatically makes them an authority on any field in which they wield an opinion. Thus Noam Chomsky, a noted scholar in linguistics, has written dozens of books condemning America's and Israel's foreign policy with only the illusion of authority.
Sowell further explains that the most educated among us know only the smallest fraction of what is to be known. That these highly educated people may know so much more than any one of us does not mean that they know a fraction as much as do all of us…
The average American knows that taking a dollar from one person and giving it to another does not create a stimulus. The average parent knows that protecting one from the consequences of bad decisions does not teach one to make good decisions. The individual citizen knows that the government will not make better health care decisions or better investment decisions because they will never know as much as all the citizens. The voter who knows the consequences of too much debt on his household does not find it more acceptable when a lot of zeros are added to the balance and the loan account is moved to Washington, D.C.
One message from the Massachusetts Senate contest was that we do not trust educated elitists with making detailed decisions about our health care and our lives. American citizens have become too smart for that. Read more…
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