"I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." -- William F. Buckley
His quip became famous.
He had the same view of the faculty of Yale, from which he graduated. He launched his intellectual career with his 1951 critique of Yale's faculty, God and Man at Yale.
It was a clever statement, but it rested on a fundamental aspect of human life. There is wisdom in crowds. That observation was hammered home in the late 19th century by the statistician and social philosopher, Francis Galton. He discovered that individual estimates made by people at a county fair regarding the weight of an ox varied widely, but when pooled statistically, their estimates were quite accurate.
The Austrian school economist F. A. Hayek made the same point in 1945 in a classic article, "The Use of Knowledge in Society."
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
Knowledge is decentralized. You and I do not know who has the correct knowledge. Hayek argued that it is the free market social order that enables people with the best knowledge to put this knowledge to productive use. They do so far better than do members of a government central planning agency.
Hayek then drew a conclusion that is not widely shared.
The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up.
The fact that individual voters are ill-equipped to judge which candidates or policies are best should not be the basis of a critique of democracy. That is one of its great advantages. Compared to a totalitarian regime, where power and knowledge are concentrated in a handful of government committees or political agencies, the democratic system is vastly more productive, for it rests on greater freedom. No individual has the right to determine the outcome of major decisions. The absence of a government committee is an advantage for both liberty and efficiency.
In democratic societies, revolutions are rare. People put up with outcomes that they do not like because they have hope that, in the next election, their political party will be successful. This patience promotes social peace. This is the greatest single advantage of democracy.
BIG GOVERNMENT => BIG BUREAUCRACY
The smaller the intrusion of civil government into our lives, the more effective democracy is. The lower the tax rates, the less power that government committees possess.
The promoters of big government are the beneficiaries of big government: college-educated people who can pass exams. Bureaucracies are inherently anti-democratic. Access to bureaucratic power is not based on the outcome of an election; it is based on the ability to pass an examination.
The other great advantage of democracy is this: people have a stake in the outcome of elections. They are governed by bureaucrats and politicians. They ought to have a say in the laws that enable the bureaucrats to push them around. This is the case for recall. It lets voters have an opportunity to remove a major politician from office who is found to be a liability.
It is easy to become contemptuous of democracy. But the people who are contemptuous of it are people who seek power that cannot be interfered with by the electorate. This is the goal of every central banker. In every college-level textbook on American government, the author praises democracy. But when he gets to the discussion of the Federal Reserve System, he praises the Federal Reserve because it is immune from politics.
Today, the electorate is divided. But it is not divided on the big issues: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. There is no disagreement on these issues at all, and these constitute about half of the federal budget.
When the electorate is divided, we should expect gridlock. That is what we have today. But that is not the fault of democracy as a system. It is the fault of millions of voters who do not agree with each other.
CONCLUSION
Democracy is a system of muddling through. It is a system that usually does not blow up in revolution. It favors social peace. So does the free market. This is why central planning does not work in politics, and it also does not work in economics. Central planning does not favor social peace. It favors a war to get control over the levers of power.
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