Who Said: "Never Trust Experts"

Yeah. Back in the day, there was a politician that said, in a letter to a pal:

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Right first time. It was Lord Salisbury, three times Prime Minister of Britland. And he actually practiced what he preached, because he acted as his own Foreign Secretary and kept the Brit Foreign Office and Sir Humphrey out of the loop.

But, in the end, I am not sure that keeping the striped-pants boys out of the loop was such a good idea. Because, 13 years after Salisbury gave up the premiership to his nephew Arthur Balfour, Britland got into World War I. Idiots. And I think the main reason for that was that Balfour and the striped-pants boys didn't have a clue.

For a start, they entered into an Entente Cordiale with France that Germany interpreted as an aggressive act against the Second Reich. Great going, guys! Generations of British politicians insisted that Britain should not ally with any continental power because the other powers would feel cornered. So the first thing that genius Balfour did was ally with a continental power.

Well, we know all about experts now, don't we, after the glorious success of the Wu Flu epidemic. They really didn't have a clue, and they recommended to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other blue-state governors that they should unload hospitals of recovering Wu Flu patients and send them into nursing homes.

Except that nursing homes have a ton of elderly patients and the recovering Wu Flu patients infected the elderly and as a result about 50 percent of the Wu Flu deaths have been among the elderly nursing home and retirement home community.

Now I know that everyone wants to blame bossy Karen Cuomo for this, but, hey, did Cuomo ever bother to read a word about Lord Salisbury and his advice about experts? Or, for that matter, the wisdom of another 19th century statesman that was probably not an idiot, Otto von Bismarck, the chap that figured out how to unite Germany in three nice little wars instead of one big one? I doubt it.

So Gov. Cuomo was just ignorant, an idiot like most politicians.

Now, of course, I have a deep philosophical system that addresses the Expert Problem. I understand, from reading The Millionaire Next Door and other works that the natural and physical thing for the scions of the educated Gentry is to become Experts, salaried experts in government and tenured experts in universities. It is much easier than a genuine life of creation, as in creating a new business, or even creating a new political party.

The scion of the educated Gentry loads up on university degrees at selective colleges and internships at well-connected institutions and then gets to work in the bureaucracy that supports the ruling class. In the government and in the university. Good work if you can get it.

And it doesn't matter if you make a complete mess of everything and bring the nation to the brink of disaster. You still got your gubmint pension, don't you Peter Strzok? You still got your tenure don't you, Professor Numbskull? Although, I suppose, things could get a little dicey if you once did a comic turn in blackface.

Now, I believe, according to my Four Laws, that administrative government of the experts cannot work because 1) there isn't enough bandwidth, 2) when you regulate business the regulated end up dominating the regulators, and 3) Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them, public school teachers. And that's to say nothing of the First Law, that socialism -- i.e., any gubmint program -- cannot work because it cannot compute prices.

So you should never trust experts because the only thing you should trust is the market and its prices and the fundamental fact of the market that it forces people to act responsibly and trust-worthily. Not because that is good or bad but because if you are not responsible and trustworthy nobody will want to deal with you.

But our liberal friends rather like the experts, and you can see why. First of all, it means jobs for liberals. Secondly, you can appeal to experts as kings once appealed to tame priests and diviners.

Yeah, funny thing how experts so often propose things that give the government more power. I wonder why that is so? And when the Little Darlings of the ruling class want to go out and protest, why, the experts say it is just fine. But it is not fine for ordinary commoners to go out and socially distance on the beach.

Yep. We live in interesting times. But I wouldn't mind if the present moment ends up giving experts a black eye. It might save these United States from civil war and demolition.