Calling Bill Buckley

Common sense v. expertise

 

William F. Buckley once said, “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory, than by the Harvard University faculty.” Okay, but if he developed a brain tumor, would he rather be operated on by someone chosen randomly or by a surgeon from the Harvard Medical School?

Common sense versus expertise—the question comes up in many aspects of life. And it has come up for as long as human societies have generated sufficient economic surplus to allow some people to specialize in particular tasks. Most societies for most of that time accepted that specialists were, well, special. Priests knew how to propitiate the gods. Warriors defended the defenseless. Rulers ruled.

The age of deference lasted a long time. But finally, in some places, starting with America, it gave way to the age of democracy. The simple fact of granting ordinary people the vote manifested a belief that in matters of governance, expertise no longer mattered so much. 

Of course, the people didn't always know the answers to hard questions. Democracy had to delegate. Thus arose representative democracy, with actual lawmaking power placed in the hands of elected officials who had the time to study issues in greater depth than ordinary people could.

Even this didn't suffice. Technical questions involving monetary policy, for example, required greater expertise than lawmakers could muster. Military strategy in wartime was delegated to the war department and the army. Diplomats handled relations with foreign countries. The legislators reserved oversight to themselves, but because they were at a loss informationally, they often had to take the word of the very experts they were supervising.

The conundrum grew worse as society grew more complicated. The industrialization of food production, for example, gave rise to demands for government inspection. But the inspectors couldn't poke every pig; they had to rely to some degree on self-reporting by the meat packers. Bank inspectors could audit occasional banks but for the rest had to rely on truthful reporting by the banks themselves. 

The experts provided more than expertise; they provided political cover. People have difficulty balancing long term payoffs against short term costs. I should study for that exam next week, but I'd rather go to the party tonight. Adding more people to the decision mix multiplies the temptation not to make the prudent investment. In America, most legislators face the people every two years. If a costly investment—a tax increase, for example—doesn’t pay off in that time, the legislators tend to refuse to make the investment. So bridges crumble and carbon continues to spew into the atmosphere. 

Lawmakers sometimes address the problem by tying their hands with expertise. After a century during which presidents and Congress couldn't resist boosting the money supply ahead of elections in order to make voters feel flush, only for them to bear the inflationary consequences later, Congress approved and Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, putting monetary policy in the hands of nonelected experts at the Fed.

After the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, even the Pentagon admitted it had more military bases around the country than it needed. But Congress couldn't bring itself to close bases because each base employed lots of people and supported lots of families in the congressional district in which it was located. To break the deadlock, Congress appointed a commission of experts and agreed to accept, as a package, their judgments on which bases to close. The procedure worked as planned.

A variant of this was adopted in trade policy. From 1945 to 2000, the priority in American policy was to lower tariffs and remove barriers to trade. But members of Congress were loath to expose firms and workers in their districts to new competition from abroad. Trade deals with other countries would get picked to tatters when they came before Congress. To prevent this, Congress agreed that trade bills had to be voted on in toto as they arrived from the trade experts. By this means the country got the benefits of freer trade—in terms of more jobs in exporting industries and lower costs to American consumers—while individual legislators were shielded from the selective ire of voters linked to American producers who lost protection. The system functioned well for decades, until the country experienced a mood shift against globalization in general.

Another shift, led by Donald Trump in a populist direction, has dented the reputation of experts the more. Trump and MAGA condemn the “deep state," meaning essentially those government employees not elected by the people. The Supreme Court, with a conservative majority bolstered by three Trump appointees, looks newly askance at the delegation of authority by Congress to unelected professionals of the executive branch.

Perhaps Bill Buckley, wherever he is, takes comfort at the recent trend. Where he might find a telephone book, in these days when the Internet, invented and maintained by highly skilled experts, has displaced the old white pages, is another question.