Excellent article from Jonah Goldberg at National Review.
According to New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his mega-best-selling book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, China banned plastic bags a few years ago. “Bam! Just like that — 1.3 billion people, theoretically, will stop using thin plastic bags,” he gushed. “Millions of barrels of petroleum will be saved, and mountains of garbage avoided.”
China’s got us beat, suggests Friedman, because its leaders aren’t hung up on democracy, checks and balances, or any of the other dusty old impediments found in the American system. Friedman has proclaimed his envy for China’s authoritarian system countless times. It’s why he titled one of the chapters in his book “China for a Day.” The idea — he calls it his “fantasy” — is that if we could just be China for a day, the experts could impose by diktat what they cannot win through democratic debate.
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Such arguments are as old as they are dangerous. And they are arrogant beyond description. People like Friedman automatically assume that their preferred policies are so obviously right, so objectively enlightened, that there’s no need to debate them or vote on them.
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Such arrogance is dangerous. The literature on the unintended consequences of policies crafted by experts is at least as old as the field of economics. Frédéric Bastiat, the great 19th-century economist, noted all that separated the good economist from the bad is the ability to appreciate the possibility of the unforeseen. Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek demonstrated that healthy economies couldn’t be controlled by experts, because the experts will always have a “knowledge problem.” They can never know all of the variables and never fully predict how their theories will play out in reality.
Posted on: Saturday, July 17, 2010 2:26 PM