Technocracy Is The Enemy of Free People Everywhere
By: Michael J. Clifford
Tags: Clifford, Stay Right, Freedom, Technocracy

Few political objectives command more attention in the public consciousness than the idea of democracy - the belief that each man and woman should have a say in their government. In the West today, this would be more appropriately referred to as representative democracy. Democracy is also frequently used to refer to countries that have some level of protections for basic rights such as free speech and a free press.

Though “democracy” is nominally the most sacrosanct institution in the minds of our political elites, the United States of America is very, very far from a direct democracy, far from even a representative democracy. Only at the very most indirect level does the ordinary citizen have a say in the policies and decisions made by their government in this country. It is paramount to know that this was by design: the people that actually make the policy decisions in this country are an intelligentsia made up of mostly educated scientific experts, who are given the authority to centrally plan society, free of normal political and electoral constraints, based on the notion that the unhampered application of their expertise to social problems will necessarily pay dividends for the common good (which, of course, the experts themselves will define).

And although there has always been an extent of rule by experts, or technocracy, at all times and places, modern-day technocracy is more of a cult than a political system. We will see more of this below.

It is important at this time to remember that the intelligent case for individual freedom has never been that free people always make the best decisions, but rather that outsourcing their decisions to unaccountable social reformers has always been worse. The stupid case for freedom is the one that the technocrats have made into their stupid case for control; the fictional, reactive “economic man”, who makes all of the right, rational decisions to maximize both his “utility” and the “utility” of society without central direction, based on his ability to reason alone. For the stupid case for freedom to hold up, this must be a useful model, and in some ways it is. But it is a great danger to turn an approximation of reality into a benchmark. The technocrats conclude that, among mankind, only they are gifted with the economic man’s talent, which they see as undesirable —everyone should behave that way, and since no human, including themselves, can ever behave that way, they are given a blank check to do whatever necessary to control man’s behavior according to their design.

That’s a lot to take in at once. Perhaps at this time I should outsource my job to a technocrat to explain what all of that means.

Here’s Peter Orszag, an investment banker who formerly served as director of the Congressional Budget Office and, later, the Office of Management and Budget under President Obama. In a 2011 article for New Republic, he admonished the American system for granting too much power to elected bodies such as Congress who were not, at the time, implementing his preferred policies. This is a problem, and it requires well-meaning, ambitious, educated folks to usurp power from the bodies that answer to the American people and impose their will unilaterally. Who can be trusted with that kind of power, you ask? Well, people like Peter Orszag.

Orszag’s ideas do not sound radical if you have any familiarity with how the U.S. government currently functions, which he himself recognizes, and which I believe is more of an indictment of our political system, which already operates according to his principles in many areas, than an exoneration of the technocratic philosophy.

Proposals abound for expanding this type of process. In the late ’90s, economist Alan Blinder proposed shifting responsibility for tax policy to a Fed-like institution of experts. Stephen Flynn of the Center for National Policy has proposed a similar process for infrastructure decisions — and, indeed, creating an infrastructure bank, as President Obama has proposed, would accomplish much the same goal. Such a bank would be empowered to select individual infrastructure projects, thereby removing some decision-making power from Congress.

Americans are usually frustrated with their elected officials — and sometimes, most of the time, rightly so. But what does it take to conclude that the very essence of government’s claim to power — its ability to levy taxes against private wealth — should not be subject to oversight from voters and elected officials, and that this can be done consistently with a democratic society? It would be very inconsistent of me to pretend as though I don’t see a problem with the clientelism that occurs within the elected bodies of Congress and the Presidency. I do. What I do not see is a world where the solution could ever be granting most or all such power to a third party who does not have to make any concessions or even listen to criticism from the people affected by the policies they make.

It is here I delegate my authority to speak to Barry Goldwater (although actually L. Brent Bozell, Jr., who ghostwrote The Conscience of a Conservative).

I suspect that this vicious circle of cynicism and failure to perform is primarily the result of the Liberals’ success in reading out of the discussion the moral principles with which the subject of taxation is so intimately connected. We have been led to look upon taxation as merely a problem of government financing: How much money does the government need? We have been led to discount, and often to forget altogether, the bearing of taxation on the problem of individual freedom. We have been persuaded that the government has an unlimited claim on the wealth of the people, and that the only pertinent question is what portion of its claim the government should exercise. The American taxpayer, I think, has lost confidence in his claim to his money. He has been handicapped in resisting high taxes by the feeling that he is, in the nature of things, obliged to accommodate whatever need for his wealth government chooses to assert.

Of course, this discussion is about administration of taxes rather than the level of taxes, but the principle is much the same. The argument goes: voters and representatives can’t have a say in how much of the public’s money is spent and where it goes, because they might make the “wrong” choices! And, of course, “the right choice” is the one I, the technocrat, have decided it is, not on the basis of political philosophy, but on the basis of objective science — an intellectual virtue only the technocrats and their supporters possess. Go figure.

Technocracy will brand itself as apolitical for two reasons. First, as already discussed, its main advert is the absence of an outside ideology (technocrats exist on the political left and political right), which is seen a primitive social device designed to entrap the technocrat and prevent him/her from solving all problems on the basis of science. Secondly, because ordinary voters and taxpayers are largely excluded from knowing or seeing what is going on and what policies are being proposed, it is not subject to the 2-year or 4-year media and election cycle of the legislative and executive branches. These two ideas are how we got the "independent" central bank. We decided that since it wasn't ideal for the President or Congress to manipulate monetary policy in service of their short-term political goals, we should grant 12 people total power to control the nation's money and banking system without any outside input.

And while that might sound like simple plutocracy (rule of the rich), technocrats ensure us that this is somehow different because, rather than being a government of the financially successful, it is a government of those who went to the proper elite schools or control the right corporations. It’s a government of the right people, not simply the lucky people. Is it sounding a bit like “divine right to rule” yet?

Virtually all responsible economists agree that we should be aiming to reduce the deficit in the long-term but not in the short-term. We need an even larger deficit in 2011 and 2012, to support a weak economy — but a much smaller deficit in 2020 and 2050, to put the nation back on a sustainable fiscal course. Yet our polarized political system has proved incapable of reaching a consensus on this common-sense approach.

This is the cult of “efficient” government, which, as previously mentioned, is already present in many areas of governance in this country. So it goes, because the elected government is too “polarized”, this makes it difficult for good policy to be made, period. I agree. I also agree that efficiency in government is not desirable in and of itself. We have arguably been led astray by a desire to judge government by standard measures of physical productivity; just as any business produces a product, governments produce laws, and we should judge government partly on the quantity and quality of laws in produces — the former being the only semi-objective measure, as the quality of the laws is clearly up for debate, for they may be a net gain or loss for particular groups of people based on class or ideological persuasion. This has not stopped the technocrats in their hyper-utilitarian ideology, hoping to use models of “aggregate social welfare” to determine which edicts are desirable.

Of course, “efficient government” is not a new idea, either — not even in this country. It was a hallmark of the Progressive Era, a period generally assumed to be between the 1890s and 1920s, where social and economic reformism reigned supreme. The era saw, most famously, the creation of antitrust laws and federal income taxes, as well as the more broadly cultural combination of previously largely philosophical fields of study, such as history and political economy (which developed the name “economics” from the combination of the words “economic” and “science”), with the scientism that dominates technocracy today.

In that change, though, was lost from social science the moral and philosophical structures to which it is intimately tied, and advocacy of individual freedom as the rule rather than the exception became an uphill battle. No existing institution — be it business, religion, or family life — was safe from the intellectual creations of the Progressive Era, for they demanded and continue to demand that a justification for all institutions and practices come from pure human reason rather than by social evolution, tradition, or culture. The distribution of property was seen as arbitrary and politically determined (which was partly true — the worst lies are those that contain truth), and fighting inequality often took precedence over all other economic goals. Religion was seen as a leftover product of a previous era of powerful clergymen and papal authority which did more to defend hierarchical social structures than serve a purpose in connecting man with a solution to the otherwise unanswerable questions of life. Hell, even traditional families were seen as backwards and requiring state intervention, as we will see later.

Before we go any further into that, let us return to Orszag’s proposal of outsourcing policy decisions to “commissions” staffed with “independent experts”. Imagine that Alan Blinder’s “Fed-like institution of experts” controlling tax policy was enacted, and let’s call it the Tax or Revenue Commission. There are now, say, 9 people, who were not chosen by the people who will be paying the consequences for their decisions, deciding how the whole of government will be funded. They draft a document detailing their proposals and submit it to Congress, who can either enact it or not. Orszag pays lip services to the very limited remaining “democratic” aspect he would maintain by pointing out that Congress still has the ability to approve or reject the proposal (although, if the technocrats’ wise ideas were being rejected too consistently, I imagine they’d propose getting rid of even that minimal oversight as well).

Yet even if Congress rejects the Commission’s ideas, the best we can do is remain under the current system — the complicated, ugly morass of a tax code we currently have. The Tax/Revenue Commission, Infrastructure Bank, or whatever other bureaucracy you could imagine would essentially be a small group of people holding the people of the United States hostage — it would be their way or the highway. “Efficient government” in this context might as well be “soft dictatorship”. As the development economist William Easterly wrote in his excellent book The Tyranny of Experts,

Having experts in charge of solving society’s problems turns things over to those who face neither a market test nor a democratic test (Easterly 2013, p. 254).

Of course, we could apply strict oversight measures to the technocrats to ensure their power is used properly, and in fact we already do to some extent with government watchdog agencies such as the GAO. That being said, we have, up to this point, failed to even get to the root of the problem with technocracy. We have only discussed ethical objections and incentive problems. The largest problem with technocratic solutions is one Easterly attends to earlier on in his book, in the context of a disagreement between the two economists who won the Riksbank Prize in Economics (not officially a Nobel) in 1974: Austria’s Friedrich Hayek and Sweden’s Gunnar Myrdal.

The basic argument has been heard many times before, but the fact that it is not original does not make it any less important. Myrdal believed in, to use his words, “social engineering”, a willingness to use government to overthrow existing institutions and traditions and create new ones without regard for the possible consequences of doing so. Hayek simply argued that the knowledge required to make economic decisions was not purely technical or empirical — that is to say, economics is not simply a scientific problem — but widely dispersed and personal. If economic knowledge is widely dispersed and personal, then so must property and political power be, and individuals must be free to develop their own institutions and traditions to address these problems. Except in cases where actual human rights violations are taking place, evolution of institutions should arise without central direction. Thus, “expert knowledge” has nothing to contribute to this process, for expert knowledge can only explain limited parts of the past. It is up to individuals, their families and communities to plan for the future.

Easterly calls the social engineer’s view of institutions the “Blank Slate” philosophy (the belief that historical evolution of social institutions is of no import and that conscious, centralized design can formulate new ones without issue — a “blank slate”).

The Blank Slate had two important consequences for the role of individual freedom in development. First, it discarded positive evidence on how well inidvidual freedom had worked in the past…required more autocratic coercion of individuals to get them to give up their previous institutions and accept the experts’ new technical solutions…[it] mostly failed in the West because democratic institutions allowed people to keep the institutions they wanted to keep…the Swedes, for example, were not wiling to give up what the Myrdals called their “pathological” traditional families and accept one “great national household” for their children. The option to evolve gradually, mostly sticking to tradition, was not the outcome of coercion, it was what came naturally.

That may be considered an extreme view, and it has thankfully not made its way here in a mainstream way. Easterly’s book is mostly a narrative on developing countries in any case, but I do disagree with him on one thing about developed nations: the belief that technocracy has failed in the West. It has succeeded brilliantly for its supporters, only manifesting itself in somewhat different ways. The federal court system has, in the last century, invented new constitutional doctrines and powers out of whole cloth (such as expanding the Commerce Clause to cover basically every possible action), and was even allowed to extra-constitutionally define the extent of its own powers in Marbury v. Madison. Unelected judges acting as “legal experts” steer the law according to their superior knowledge of how to design a society, free from the constraints imposed on the Congress and the legislatures of the several States who have the sole power to amend the Constitution. The central bank, as already mentioned, is nothing but a technocratic central planning board for the most important good in any market economy, the currency, and has never actually been free of political influence (regardless of what we hear from textbooks and the press).

Yet it’s easiest to see technocracy’s great influence in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even mild skepticism of restrictions on free movement and commerce are enough to provoke calls of “science denier!” from a particular movement of people. From whom is this great wisdom of “science” coming?

On December 4, 2020, Reason Magazine published an article titled “Many Epidemiologists Want Social Distancing and Masks Forever — Even After the Vaccine”. That’s not simply them taking the words of the respondents out of context, either; this is what they meant by “new normal”. And here’s the real kicker: by and large, epidemiology is not even a science, but a social science, all of which have their roots in philosophy. The field within which these people practice is essentially just a branch of political science focused on disease management, and explains why epidemiologists have to write editorials defending their discipline from the attacks of the other “true” sciences such as virology (the branch of biology which studies the viruses themselves), which do little to persuade me, among others. The trite observation that all facets of human behavior, and therefore social science, affect variables studied in the other sciences do not make their prescriptions any less opinion or philosophy-based.

In a sentence, you can conjure up an expert in any field to agree with you on something, but you are at an advantage to do so in the social sciences. The old parable that 5 economists will give 6 different answers to the same question is not too much of an exaggeration, and it even applies to basic facts about the discipline. At least experts in the true sciences will have some level of agreement about basic facts and theories, even if this expertise does not make them omniscient or good central planners.

I want to conclude in saying I do not intend to demonize scientific expertise as a whole. All fields of knowledge have a place in a system where prosperity depends on the utilization of widely dispersed knowledge. This makes it all the more paramount to denounce technocracy, which does not acknowledge that — it portends that only the knowledge and abilities of the well-educated has meaning for the ambitious social planners. A free society is therefore required to put the scientific disciplines in their rightful place as spheres of learning rather than control.

Technocracy is thus the final purpose that concludes all projects of social control in today’s societies, regardless of their origins. It is the idea that those who have created nothing can direct everything, the idea that limited knowledge of the past grants one unlimited capacity to change the future. It is the creed of central planning (“playing God”), placing science — or more appropriately, scientism — on a pedestal above the human creativity and ingenuity that has guided history until now, and puts all of us at the whims of tyrants who assure us they do not ever need to second guess their decisions, unlike we peons, who are feeble, irrational creatures of habit, stuck in our old ways and resistant to the eternal march of Progress of which only they, guided by cold, calculated data rather than personal biases and fears, are sufficiently learned to facilitate.

In removing from decision-making the naturally deductive process of trial-and-error, rendering scientific inquiry a wholly inductive process freed from the “black box” of a priori theory construction, technocracy attempts to remove from humans the forces which makes us human, and which render the generation of prosperity under socialism, fascism, and all their variants impossible, both in “theory” and in practice.

No matter your political views, I hope we can agree on that.