They Mean to Be Masters - A Review of Trust Us

American Institute for Economic Research ^ | 2/23/2023 | Art Carden

[Wuli]

Irely on experts. Everyone should. Sick? Visit the doctor. Tooth trouble? The dentist. Car trouble? The mechanic. Climbing Mount Everest? Hire a guide. Want to come closer to God? A church near you meets at 10:30 or 11 this Sunday. Experts are indispensable aides to lives well-lived. Trust Us, a new documentary from the Pacific Legal Foundation, discusses experts in a wholly different role. These experts do not offer advice. They issue commands. The documentary considers the role experts assumed in the twentieth century: figuring out what you should do and how you should do it. You aren’t just to seek their counsel. You are to obey – or else.

Trust Us tells the story of the administrative state’s emergence and evolution through the twentieth century. A group of eminent commentators that includes Amity Shlaes (author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression and Great Society: A New History) and Roger Koppl (author of Expert Failure) begin by explaining Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas about “scientific management” — a term he used at the suggestion of Louis Brandeis – and finish by discussing expert failure during the COVID pandemic. Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public, argued that “The Communist Party is the ultimate Taylorist organization.” Experts would give orders, the rest of us would obey, and utopia would follow. In an age of scientific management and governance, bourgeois notions of economic and political freedom could be dispensed with, lest they obstruct the experts’ plans.

[Wuli]

Not as comprehensive as an expose of the administrative state could be, but it makes a decent if narrow jab at it.

[marktwain]

Yes, a good first go at it.

Well worth the read.

"Well meaning" experts are far more of a threat to us than are capitalists and businessmen.

[Elsie]

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,

' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'