The crowd is always smarter than a centralized government
Stupidity is present in all populations in similar numbers. Gender, ethnicity, nationality, education, and income – all have a fixed percentage of stupid people.
Thomas Sowell expounds on his concept of consequential knowledge. ‘Experts', he says, might be smarter and have more information at hand, but they do not command even 1% of the consequential knowledge required to meet individual needs. You have far more consequential knowledge about your needs than all the experts put together.
The crowd is always smarter than a centralized government. We, the people, have the consequential knowledge that matters. Moreover, when woke politicians politicize decision-making – well, they are stupid and their censorial approach to other ideas reflects their closed-mindedness.
Harri Oinas-Kukkonen, a behavioral scientist, captures the wisdom of the crowd. It is possible, he says, to describe how people in a group think as a whole, and in some cases, groups are remarkably intelligent, often smarter than the smartest people in them.
Large groups are always smarter than bureaucrats with a political agenda. This is especially true of the current administration. Biden’s people were not picked on merit. They are there because they support legislation that benefits either them or their narrow constituencies. When a government is too large, it misallocates taxpayer capital and in doing so weakens the private sector and a market economy.
In 1976, Carlo Maria Cipolla, an Italian economist, published a 60-page essay entitled “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.” I won’t discuss each of his five laws here – but I will touch on three. (1) Stupidity is present in all populations in similar numbers. Gender, ethnicity, nationality, education, and income – all have a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are as many stupid doctors, lawyers, scientists, and politicians – in a word, experts – as there are stupid plumbers and streetcleaners. (2) The non-stupid always underestimate the number of stupid people, and (3) stupid people are dangerous.
It is naïve to ignore (1) and (2) and an act of self-harm to ignore (3).
For a summary of Cipolla’s essay, see https://psychology-spot.com/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/
This is precisely why we must insist on following the 10th Amendment. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The states provide us with 50 experiments or solutions to specific problems (I like using California as an example of the wrong approach but one that must be encouraged to demonstrate how California solutions fail.)
Unfortunately, we have allowed the federal (central) government to take over via coercion. The Feds allocate funds back to the states to do as instructed, a backdoor way to violate the 10th Amendment. The result is one solution rather than 50 and thus the entire population suffers from a bad decision rather than just the population of the state (granted California affects a lot of people but it's still less than the US population).
It's time to reduce federal taxes, reduce the federal bureaucracy, return authority to the "States respectively, or to the people" and to localize the solutions (and errors) so less damage is done and so better solutions can be found more quickly.
Crowd? Or, mob? Don’t think so.