"Never Trust Experts" Dear Ruling Class

Here we are nearly two years into the COVID crisis and the politicians and the women are all telling us to "follow the experts."

But Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of Great Britain in the late 19th century, had a different take on experts.

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

Not to mention Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister of Great Britain in the last 1950s.

We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.

Here's something that caught my eye this morning. "COVID mutation." OMG! MUTATION! 

UK doctors call for urgent return of Covid restrictions as experts monitor new mutation.

What? A mutation? Sounds awful! End of the world! Women and minorities hardest hit! Only this is a mutation of the COVID Delta variant.

Oh. Well. Is that all? Who knew?

So I am here with a word to all you chaps and chapettes in the Ruling Class being advised by experts. Science, dontcha know.

Now I don't know how many of you ruling-class chappies are familiar with Lord Salisbury. This aristocrat acted as his own Foreign Secretary, because he thought that the bureaucrats at the Foreign Office were nincompoops. And one of his principles was that Britain should not have alliances in Europe. That was because he felt it would encourage the allied power to gang up on the other powers. 

Don't understand? Well, soon after the death of Lord Salisbury his son-in-law Arthur Balfour set up an Entente Cordiale with the French. And by 1914 there was a Triple Entente with Russia and France and Britain. And then World War I.

Because maybe the poor bloody Germans thought that everybody was ganging up on them. You think?

So I am here to tell you geniuses: "be careful of experts." Why? Because experts are weasels. What they want is the ear of the powerful, so they can strut their stuff with their colleagues. Oh, and grants.

That means that, ten-to-one, they will tell the politician what he wants to hear, not what he needs to hear.

And I would say that right now the Biden administration desperately needs to hear from experts that are willing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth instead of nice comfortable words to make the rulers feel good about themselves.

Item: Economics. In my view, the way to understand macroeconomics is that it exists partly to let politicians do what comes naturally, to spread out loot and plunder, and partly to help politicians get out of a jam from too much loot and plunder. That's what Keynesian economics was about. It said to politicians: go ahead and spend all you like! It will get us out of the Great Depression (Only it didn't). Until the Seventies when it got the Carter administration in a bit of a jam and led to President Reagan. The same thing is happening right now with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that says that it's OK for governments to do Money Printer Go Brrrrr. Until it isn't. Until we get big inflation and food prices and gas prices and heating costs go into the stratosphere, and ordinary voters that don't pay much attention to politics get really mad. 

Reality Check: deficit spending and money printing are going to get you in trouble Mr. Politician. Do as little of it as you must.

Item: COVID. In my view COVID is like any epidemic. It burns through the population, and at the end of it the survivors survive and the dead are remembered only by their mothers. There is stuff you can do to help; there is stuff you do that doesn't help. But. In our age with women in the public square and voting, and my maxim that "women expect to be protected," politicians feel they have to take the "if we can just save one life" approach. That's what lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine mandates are all about: appealing to women that that believe that the whole world can go hang as long as their children are safe. It's why the Democrats are all-in on mandates, because Democrats are the women's party. It's why a chap like Ron DeSantis in Florida is going the let-it-burn-through route. Because the GOP is the men's party. 

Reality Check: an epidemic is an epidemic. We can do things to mitigate it, maybe. But in the end it has to burn through, especially now that it looks like the vaccinations only provide partial protection and the majority of hospitalized COVID cases are fully vaccinated. This epidemic seems a lot less horrible than we are pretending. It's basically killing off "fully vaccinated" old geezers like Gen. Powell, age 84, who already had multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer. Back in the day, we called pneumonia "the gentleman's friend" because it took him out swiftly with very little pain.

By the way. There seems to be a reverse experts effect right now where experts are reluctant to go public with science that challenges the ruling-class narrative. And social media is censoring scientists that go against the ruling-class narrative. You know what, rulers? This is not good. Not for you and not for the American people.