“They want to be masters”: Trust Us review

I rely on experts. Everyone should. Sick? Visit a doctor. Problems with teeth? Dentist. Car problems? Mechanic. Climbing Everest? Get a guide. Do you want to get closer to God? The church near you meets at 10:30 or 11 this Sunday. Experts are indispensable assistants in a prosperous life. Trust us, a new documentary from the Pacific Legal Foundation, discusses experts in a very different role. These experts do not give advice. They issue commands. The documentary examines the role that experts have taken on in the twentieth century: to figure out what you should do and how you should do it. You should not just seek their advice. You must obey – otherwise.

Trust us tells the story of the emergence and evolution of the administrative state in the twentieth century. A group of distinguished commentators that includes Amity Shlais (author The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression And Great Society: A New History) and Roger Kopple (author Expert error) begin with an explanation of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas about “scientific management” – a term he used at the suggestion of Louis Brandeis – and end with a discussion of expert errors during the COVID pandemic. Martin Gurry, author public uprising, argued that “The Communist Party is the supreme Taylorist organization.” The experts will give orders, the rest will obey, and utopia will follow. In the era of scientific management and leadership, bourgeois notions of economic and political freedom could be dispensed with so as not to interfere with the plans of experts.

Consider Taylorism and the fascination of Western intellectuals with central planning. Frederick W. Taylor was obsessed with precision and ways to improve the efficiency of industrial processes. Workers, from this point of view, were little better than beasts of burden, commanded by experts who had been given this power by science. But, as noted by Roger Kopple of Syracuse University, author of the book Expert error explains, experts could tell non-specialists how to do it, no matter This is The documentary explains that Progressivism has applied Taylorism to politics. We can do without markets, democracy and various freedoms and just get down to business, because the experts can understand what to do and how. Conversation is redundant in an administrative state that can save time and resources by relying on directions and dictation.

An illustrative example is the enthusiasm of Western intellectuals towards the Soviet Union. Soviet flattery and the gullibility of the intelligentsia eventually led to an apology for tyranny. The USSR invited American and other Western intellectuals and journalists to fully paid, carefully planned feasts “to admire the achievements of the Soviet Union” that showed them a grossly exaggerated version of Soviet efficiency and justice. They were amazed. Journalist Lincoln Steffens once remarked, “I’ve seen the future, and it works!” about his visit to the USSR. Other participants on the trip included future members of the Franklin Roosevelt Think Tank, Rexford Tugwell (who considered agriculture under capitalism to be inefficient) and Stuart Chase (who called capitalism a “leftover”). Both believed that society should be run by intellectuals and technicians. Tourists did not have a chance to see the Gulag. As Kevin Porttheus of Hillsdale College put it in a documentary, “Only educated Western intellectuals would be stupid enough to believe in the kabuki theater that Stalin’s Russia or anyone else presents to them.” Inflammatory, yes, but there’s a reason Christian Nimitz wrote a book called Socialism: a failed idea that will never die.

However, as George Mason University economist Donald Boudreau explains in the documentary, the appeal of communism came from a category error. We could not run society like one big factory precisely because it No one big factory. A country, Boudreau explained, is not a company. He cannot reduce his goals to one simple metric such as profit, and he has no residual contenders. Without market-driven prices, there is no reliable way to identify and value alternative uses for assets. These are all political opinions.

As Peter Saunders remarked, speaking of F. A. Hayek, “capitalism offends intellectual pride; socialism flatters it.” Schlaes put it this way: “They all left with one big impression: ‘I can have more power. I may have more power because the Russians have.” Things went awry when Soviet apologist Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that was later found to be misleading. He was listened to by the people and Roosevelt, and he (and the members of the progressive Brain Trust) made the most of it. Donald Boudreau explains that they will make it work because “they are smarter than the rest of us”.

At least they certainly thought so. The documentary explains the rise and fall of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) in light of the famous Supreme Court decision. Shechter Bird solution. The court ruled unanimously in favor of the Shekhters and found the NRA and its “rational control” unconstitutional. The miners won, but the case ruined them. This is an interesting, if depressing, example of a frenetic examination. The name Schechter comes from the Hebrew word for “slaughter”. They had a long family experience in poultry farming and local knowledge of Jewish cuisine. Commentators on the documentary highlight the leniency towards the Schechters. It is doubtful that the experts knew much about how to butcher chickens, but it did not matter. They were experts, as were those who destroyed food while Americans were starving because the Agricultural Adjustment Act was designed to stabilize prices.

The history of planning and failure of the twentieth century continued even after the Roosevelt administration, thanks to the Fair Deal under Harry Truman and massive slum clearance projects that housed the poor in tower blocks that turned into veritable war zones. Schleiss called them “prisons”. History of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. Louis is especially tragic. Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who designed the project, later said, “Social ills cannot be cured by beautiful buildings.” The buildings are gone, but the pride that inspired them remains intact.

The Great Society further expanded the administrative state. At the end of the twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first, we find that more and more of our lives are being touched – very harshly, in fact – by experts who know how to protect our health, our finances, our homes, our families.. .all if we just shut up and let them have their way. As Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer Steve Simpson explained, this new “fourth branch” of government has the powers of the other three. He could issue guidelines, directives, rules and regulations and act as judge, jury and executioner in his own affairs.

The planners’ assumption came into full play during the COVID pandemic. During the pandemic, we have heard repeated calls The science And Scientists who could predict “what will happen if you just follow their orders.” After all, they were based on Science.

The current debate about the response to the COVID pandemic overlooks the fact that those in charge have been a big part of the problem, interfering with people’s decisions to buy masks, influencing prices, and ultimately interfering with the production and distribution of the vaccine. The end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 witnessed an eerie spectacle as people searched around for expired vaccine doses and threw them out for fear of being embraced by the wrong people in the wrong order. It was an exercise in madness.

Shouldn’t we use experience and experts? Kopple says, “Yes.” But he also warns us against fearing the power of experts, not because experts are bad people, but because so many of their statements do not follow from their expert opinions, unless we add the auxiliary assumption that they are able to control other people’s lives – say them how to use their capital, borrowing a phrase from Adam Smith. This experience runs into another kind of experience that doesn’t get as much attention and respect, but should ultimately be decisive. As Boudreau says at the end of the documentary: “No one understands what is good for me better than me, and I have an incentive to do it right. Don Boudreau is the world’s leading expert on Don Boudreau.” Experts can tell Don Boudreau what the trade-offs are. However, they lack what Hayek called “knowledge of the specific circumstances of time and place.” Hayek puts it this way in a famous passage from his classic article The Use of Knowledge in Society:

Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge.. But a little reflection will show that there is undoubtedly a body of very important but unorganized knowledge that can by no means be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: knowledge of the specific circumstances of time and place. It is in this respect that practically every person has some advantage over everyone else, because he has unique information that could be used to good use, but which can only be used if the decisions that depend on it are presented to him or made. with his active collaboration.

Imagine, for example, that Don Boudreau was about to buy a gas stove. He could read the latest scientific evidence on the differences between gas and electric stoves and find that gas stoves account for about 13 percent of asthma in the United States. Even if this figure is accurate and accurate, the experts who measured it cannot decide what Don Boudreau should do, nor can they tell the government that gas stoves should be banned, regulated, or otherwise restricted. Political conclusions do not follow from scientific conclusions, and not just because you can’t deduce “should” from “is”. Why not?

Pay special attention to Boudreau. First, cooking with gas may have culinary advantages over electricity. We can say that we think Boudreau should make a different choice if he’s willing to take a higher risk of asthma in favor of tastier food, but that’s a matter of preference, not science. Second, he may have a higher risk of asthma because he believes gas is more reliable. My own family was able to enjoy a hot candlelit meal during a power outage because we could cook it on our gas stove. Third, there may be other, cheaper ways to reduce the additional risk of asthma, such as spending more time outdoors or opening windows. Fourth, unforeseen consequences are inevitable. Let’s say Boudreau thinks that cooking on an electric stove isn’t as fun, and perhaps (again) the food isn’t as tasty. So he cooks less and eats more tasty but notoriously unhealthy takeaway food. In a few months we are looking for experts to advise us about how to deal with his waist extension and increased blood pressure.

Experts can know a lot. They can help us identify likely trade-offs. They cannot tell us what concessions to make, and whoever dares to do so is an ambitious tyrant. I am reminded of a quote by Daniel Webster: “At all times there are people who want to rule well, but they want to rule. They promise to be good hosts, but they want to be hosts.” Trust us? Perhaps we would be wiser to be careful.

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Art Carden is a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also an adjunct professor of economics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and a fellow at the Independent Institute.

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