After the Chinese Embassy in Serbia was
bombed, the United States said that the reason for this
disaster was that "Experts" at the Central Intelligence
Agency got the buildings mixed up. This was a huge, murderous,
and inexcusable error. But when the bombing became a scandal,
the CIA said that no one would be punished for it. No
one was fired. No one was even transferred.
Some people were surprised and outraged.
Pardon me, but where have those people been for the past
fifty years? The way the CIA dealt with this issue is
the way our society deals with all of its ruling "Experts."
No expert is ever punished for causing a disaster. In
fact, it never makes the slightest difference whether
an expert's advice leads to success or failure.
Robert McNamara freely admitted that he
went along with continuing and EXPANDING the Vietnam War
long after he knew it was hopeless.
As Secretary of Defense, he helped get tens
of thousands of Americans killed. McNamara has never lost
a day's pay or a night's sleep because of this.
In fact, the exact opposite is the case.
After Vietnam his opinion is sought after, because he
has all that EXPERIENCE. Before Vietnam, he was an automobile
executive, and his failure there cost his company hundreds
of millions of dollars. But that made him EXPERIENCED,
so he was appointed Secretary of Defense. So he helped
cause the Vietnam disaster. That made him more experienced,
so he his advice became even more precious.
Examples of this rule are everywhere. The
other day I was watching police chases on a national television
program. One of these desperate chases occurred right
here in South Carolina. The tape showed a nineteen-year-old
running from police at well over a hundred miles an hour.
Eventually he crashed. Several of his young passengers
were killed. This nineteen-year-old is now in prison for
life for first-degree murder.
The commentator mentioned in passing that
this teenager had been convicted of reckless driving TWELVE
TIMES before! Legal experts, psychologists, lawyers and
judges, let this man go TWELVE TIMES before he earned
a life sentence for murder, and he is only NINETEEN YEARS
OLD!
So what happened to the judges, lawyers,
psychiatrists and other experts who let all this happen?
Do you think any of them lost a day's pay or a night's
sleep over this?
Of course not.
Any time our society has a social or educational
problem, we pay Experts to deal with it. Now, what is
an "Expert?" An Expert is a person with "experience."
When did they get that experience? They got it while the
problem we are trying to deal with developed. Look at
the people we hire to be experts on education. They went
to school and got their experience when all their professors
were pushing all the latest educational fads. They got
their experience making schools get rid of phonics and
developing sensitivity training programs and implementing
all the other fads.
As every kind of test score dropped, today's
"education experts" were part of the hallelujah
chorus putting their professional reputations on the line
in favor of all the nonsense being pushed. They praised
this nonsense to the skies, or they lost their "Expert"
title.
So when the school crisis reached the point
where even respectable conservatives had to mention it,
who did we call in to SOLVE the problem? The educational
experts, of course. You will see them at the front of
the room every time this problem is discussed.
When was the last time you ever heard of
any social policy expert losing anything by causing a
disaster? I discussed the fact that, purely for their
own power, economic planning nuts have caused far more
misery and death and poverty than ten Hitlers, or even
ten Stalins, combined (See January 16 article, "Why
We Have An Unprecedented Economic Boom"). So
who are our economic experts today? Those same people
and the people they trained, of course.
One of the leading economic planning advocates
was John Galbraith. It made him rich and famous. Economic
planning has been discredited, but Galbraith is still
considered a great expert.
Once again, the fact that the Galbraiths
have caused endless suffering means nothing. The point
is that they have been in the public eye. If one of them
recommends a policy, they will get the attention of the
public, including all respectable conservatives. A person
whose recommendations have always WORKED will get none.
We never ask any expert whether any of his
policies have ever worked.
When our social policy leads to another disaster, and
we are looking for someone to show his qualifications
for solving the new problem, how do we select someone
to deal with that problem? We demand that that person
prove one thing. We demand that he prove that he is an
Expert with Experience. In other words, we demand that
he be one of the people who CAUSED the disaster.
Which means we get another disaster.
Once again, as I explained, when you follow
these rules, you are "Getting Exactly What You Ask For"(May 29).
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