Thomas Sowell Quotes
But third-party decision making by surrogates for “society” offers no a priori reason to expect a closer approximation to omniscience. On the contrary, such surrogates not only lack the detailed and direct knowledge of the innumerable circumstances surrounding each of the millions of individuals whose decisions they are preempting, they lack the incentives of direct gain and loss from being right or wrong, and they have every incentive to persist in mistaken policies (from which they suffer little), rather than admit to being wrong (from which they could suffer much).
Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, Basic Books (1996)
Mead argues that this is a trend that has been operating over many administrations. It could be argued that modern communications and the media have been significant drivers of this phenomenon along with the desire for White House staff to have as much control as they can obtain. Before modern communications, an Ambassador, or a Secretary of Commerce had to make decisions within the philosophical and political umbrella of the President’s general policies. They could not communicate immediately with the President or his staff. But once everyone in the government was connected, the President’s staff could make every important decision. However, with the many different major issues and emergencies of the modern era, the small group in the What House have not been able to deal with them all and the bureaucracy has been instructed not to decide big things without going through the White House. See {642086}.
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
