Coronavirus and the Prospect of a Society Run by Experts

The basic national divide between conservative America and liberal/left America that has existed for decades – really since the 1960s – is continuing on in the new environment caused by the coronavirus crisis. The American Right continues to want a society informed by its Judeo-Christian heritage, given force by a government in which the original intent of the Constitution prevails, and its objective of limited government. The American Left continues to want an expansive government with a messianic character, empowered to do whatever is deemed necessary for its vision of “a better world,” and aided by science and technology. The current epidemic appears to have shuffled the deck to favor the Left.

The epidemic favors the Left, at least in the way it has been addressed. Controlling the epidemic has become the overriding priority, setting aside all other considerations. But surely for the nation as a whole, the economy is the first consideration. This was well argued by Pat Buchanan in a recent opinion piece questioning whether saving thousands of lives is worth precipitating a great depression, in addition to predicting the end of small government conservativism with the crushing debt economic rescue will bring. With businesses closed for weeks on end, that cannot help but be the result. One could be forgiven for thinking that the medical advisors advocating shutdown with their dramatic charts were fishing for numbers to overcome any possible opposition.

Was saving hundreds of thousands, or even low millions of lives more important than anything else? These were worst case predictions. The 1918-20 flu epidemic killed 670,000 Americans, and that was in a population of 106 million people. More than one half of one percent (0.6%) of Americans died. Today the same number of deaths (far beyond the top figure of 240,000 in a recent projection of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci) out of 326 million people would mean 0.2% of the population dies. And shutdowns in 1918-19 were local, not involving most of the states, as they have been this year.

By prioritizing “saving lives” over all other considerations, our political leaders have given enormous power to the people most competent to speak about how to save lives in the epidemic, namely, epidemiologists, but especially Drs. Fauci and Deborah Birx, who advise the President and (more importantly) have the ear of the public. By making the economy secondary, the government has precipitated the sharpest economic downturn in history, presaging a great depression. Most recently, by shutting down factories due to coronavirus fears, we are cutting off supply, causing supply chains to break.

Closing businesses and “social distancing” conceivably might be the most effective way to stop the epidemic, but it comes at the cost of destroying businesses, throwing millions out of work, and impoverishing the nation for a generation with a crushing debt. We need to remember that we are not talking about anything so impersonal as a “business,” but about many people who own and operate small businesses, who have devoted their lives to building up their business, and now see it going up in smoke in just a few days. This in itself is devastating, as is the owners’ helplessness to give employment to the millions of workers they employed, and who have lost their livelihoods.

So there is much more to the moral equation than just “saving lives” versus an affluent way of life. By making expert opinion on one objective (stopping the disease) all important, we cause a severe moral imbalance. This was recently well argued in an article in Public Discourse, which identified experts (who offer competent analysis of a particular problem), politicians (who offer prudence and should be making the final decisions), and the public (who offer common sense) as the important players in public decision making. It might be added that the common sense of the public is very valuable, since the public has perhaps a broader perspective than even the very intelligent experts, and must live (in this case for years), with the politicians’ decisions.

But it can easily be seen what will result if the experts who have favored a national shutdown continue to prevail. Their pronouncements gain enormous moral force, as well as scientific authority. The national meritocracy is trained in the far-left universities, and its vision will be incontestable by the average American – accepted as the only rational and moral way to think. Again, while some extraordinary precautions might be reasonably required, it is also reasonable that the drastic lockdown was unnecessary. Most people aren’t going to die, and we could, for instance, lower the speed limit to 35 mph, or eliminate cars if we are intent on “saving lives.”

The messianic role of the government in the Left’s vision militates against civil society. The state must intervene wherever necessary to achieve its objectives, which are overriding. This is precisely what “social distancing” is accomplishing. Organizations independent of the state cannot now meet in person in much of the country. People are now isolates, dependent on the state in many cases for financial help to get out of the crisis. Activities outside the home must be justified, and crises such as the supply chain crisis noted above call for government action. Groups must meet “virtually,” by electronic means that can be centrally controlled.

And central control is the point. Not surprisingly, the American Left strongly supports the shutdown, opposing certain treatments seeking to cure (particularly one recommended by the President), in favor of a vaccine, which will take many months, at least, to develop. But this is not surprising. The Left wants a social system with no problems. Rather than cures, it requires prevention. If it establishes its policy of prevention on this problem, it can more easily make (morally and scientifically authoritative) pronouncements on other policy issues. Any opposition is “harmful.” As the longtime anti-Left polemist David Horowitz has argued, the Left favors America’s enemies because they are collectivist.

Currently, America’s main collectivist enemy is China. Speculation has abounded about the origin of the virus in China, about the communist regime’s possible involvement in the virus’ origin at its Wuhan virology lab, and possible export by not restricting international travel out of Wuhan while the city was quarantined internally. But whatever truth there is in that, China appears to be clearly using the pandemic to export its centrally controlled vision of society as superior to a free society. For a number of years it has aspired to duplicate America’s Marshall Plan reconstruction of Europe with a its own Marshall Plan (in large measure its Belt Road Initiative). But post-war America was in a position to re-order a devastated continent. The chaos resulting from the disproportionate government response to the coronavirus pandemic gives China the opportunity, as the National Review article noted in the above link, to do the same with countries devastated by the pandemic, and gravely impair America’s previously strong economy as well. Additionally, it has been noted that the Belt Road Initiative results in a cycle of dependency on China, rather than enhancing countries’ economic strength.

But this is not surprising. Dependency, tyranny, and poverty are the natural results of socialist control, as we have seen recently in Venezuela, where the Left came to power democratically. The Left is indeed attacking the economy, but it is reasonable to say that it is against any economy. Economics is a modern science, and describes how production and consumption will naturally balance. Arguably, a capitalist economy is the only kind that there is. Socialism is just a human effort to make production and consumption what those in power think they should be.

As noted in my last article, the nation’s governors have assumed enormous power to determine what national policy will be in this crisis, power that they have constitutionally, but this writer believes many, if not most, exercised it unwisely. The power they assumed radically reduced personal liberties. The more conspiratorially minded feel that it is a test, to see how far people will comply. But there doesn’t have to be secret planning for different parts of the political spectrum to see avenues to power. The Left’s objective is to control society to remake it according to its own vision. That vision does not include traditional Christianity, and its doctrines of exclusive salvation and sexual morality. We should deny the competence of experts to override politics in the name of science, reason, and health because it is not true (no one is expert enough to dictate policy to the nation), but also because we need the religious freedom to obey God as we should. Unlike the state, we are accountable for the conduct of lives after we have lived this one.

Our colleges/governments are controlled and operated by the Intellectual Yet Idiots, who have been controlling our lives for decades.

Nassim Taleb Exposes The World’s “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot” Class!

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence and fall into circularities?—?, but their main skills is ability to pass exams written by people like them.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence and fall into circularities?—?but their main skills is capacity to pass exams written by people like them.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism?—?in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types?—?those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior?—?much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local premium today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in many countries, the government’s role is ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP).

The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and rarely seen outside specialized outlets, social media, and or the IYI.

Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite.

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When Plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”.

What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools, and PhDs as these are needed in the club.

More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver.

Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair.

The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only will he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some other such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.

The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.

Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).

The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba; he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past 5 years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics; he knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-16/nassim-taleb-exposes-worlds-intellectual-yet-idiot-class

Grampa Dave, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread, was Sowell’s “Intellectuals and Society”.

Thing is, this Coronavirus situation shows that the same values that make a capitalistic society successful should have been applied to this pandemic, and here’s why, IMO.

In a planned economy such as the Soviet Union, you get a specific group of people making economic decisions. Those experts understood what was going on in Moscow, but had no idea of what Ukranians wanted. And the economic result was no toilet paper, a lot of shoe laces, and no wealth being generated.

In a capitalistic economy people everywhere who hold a dollar bill in their hand can make an economic decision with that dollar bill. Individual people make stupid decisions, but when millions of people start voting with that dollar, you usually get the right movement in the economy, wealth is created, and people get to buy their kid the GI-Joe with the Kung Fu grip.

In this current situation, such as we have in Washington and throughout the nation, you have a specific group of people making risk decisions FOR people. The equivalent of those Moscow ‘Experts’. So what we get is a destroyed economy, people being treated like criminals, and squandered and misallocated resources.

If people were allowed to make their own decisions they way they would in a capitalistic economy, instead of a dollar bill, they would have their own well being in their hand and that would be their vote. If people were allowed to make that analysis of risk and need the way a capitalist would, the water would find their own level. I guarantee you, if we got something like the Black Plague where there was a 40% mortality rate, they wouldn’t have to pass laws and have people held prisoner in their own homes. Those people would do it quite on their own, and might well do their own quarantine enforcing with their own weapons to ensure nobody would break THEIR quarantine.

We have two extremes described here, one where the proclaimed experts get to make all the choices including the wrong and tyrannical ones, and people get to make those choices themselves, dying or living by their own choice.

The water will find its own self-regulating level, and we wouldn’t have governments stepping on the rights of its citizens. People would make that voluntary decision and self-quarantine if that was the result of their own risk analysis.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.