TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Arnold Kling discusses the use of experts by government to control certain sectors:

We live in an increasingly complex world. We depend on experts more than ever. Yet experts are prone to failure, and there are no perfect experts.

Given the complexity of the world, it is tempting to combine expertise with power, by having government delegate power to experts. However, concentration of power makes our society more brittle, because the mistakes made by government experts propagate widely and are difficult to correct.

It is unlikely that we will be able to greatly improve the quality of government experts.

Instead, if we wish to reduce the knowledgepower discrepancy, we need to be willing to allow private-sector experts to grope toward solutions to problems, rather than place unwarranted faith in experts backed by the power of the state.

This is a fascinating use to Hayek’s basic argument that markets are the spontaneous order created by the interconnection of knowledge distributed throughout many minds, and it is impossible for any one person or group to have all knowledge necessary to make the same decisions a market makes through these interconnections (e.g. the price of lead).

Kling’s addition is that this dispersion of knowledge is accelerating, so this is getting even more difficult than before, but there is a parallel trend of government putting experts in certain fields in charge of controlling some part of that field. Kling’s argument is that it is fallacious to assume they can make those judgments, and as time passes it only becomes less viable.

This trend troubles me, too, because the premise underlying it is that these experts (the ones chosen) know so much that they can make legally-binding decisions for everyone else. If we accept this, then we also accept that others should be making decisions for how we live our lives that we have no choice in. If we accept that, than why shouldn’t we also accept a planned society?