In the past few posts, I sought to draw attention to drift, even on the right to a state-directed economy. This tendency is more pronounced on the left, but this idea is gaining currency. In their genius, government elites will provide better outcomes than market-based solutions. Rather than greedy profiteers who only think about their bottom line making decisions, we accommodate all stakeholders. 

On the surface, this sounds plausible. The best and the brightest of our society are more intelligent than we are, so these “expers” are bound to make better decisions. 

As I pointed out in my series, “The Long Journey to More,” elites’ rule was how we organized settled societies worldwide for thousands of years. A usually hereditary group, generally less than ten percent, controlled the rest of the population. The government, clergy, and military resided here. The masses mostly toiled at subsistence, any surpluses extracted for the benefit of the ruling class. The rest of the people will get their reward in the next world.

As bad as this sounds to us today, this organization made sense. Knowledge of when and what to plant, how to build and maintain irrigation systems, and a host of other things needed exchangeable knowledge, but the costs of literacy severely limited its availability. Putting marks on clay tablets and preserving them is time-consuming. Writing with ink on parchment consumed the lives of many monks—the scarcity of things available to read limited literacy to a few.

Further, the educated class had little incentive to change a system benefitting them with the best things available. Change might upset their position. For this reason, innovation of any kind was suspect and often opposed.