“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they‘re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” – Ronald Reagan

Despite living in one of the most successful civilizations on planet earth, a significant majority of American (and Western) intellectuals have constantly found fault with the American way of life and in particular with the free enterprise system that has brought about an abundance of wealth such as has not heretofore been experienced in human civilization. This “embarrassment of riches,” to use a term popularized by historian Simon Schama, has enabled most Americans considered poor to live a quality of life that could only be attained by the aristocratic minority of the past, and indeed, would make them part of the 1% in much of the rest of the world today. And yet historically, the American (and Western) intellectual class has sided with a pantheon of tyrants beginning with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, Arafat, Hugo Chavez, and on and on; there’s hardly been a tyrant not beloved by the American intellectual Left.

I recently presented a talk at a local tea party group entitled, How to argue with a Leftist or, Why does the Left always side with tyrants?, exploring this very question, that is, the American Left’s fascination with tyrants. This is true of the academic Left and the Mainstream Media Left as well as the Hollywood celebrity Left. Further pursuing this topic, I am now reading economist Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society (New York: Basic Books, 2009). Sowell defines intellect as “the capacity to grasp and manipulate complex concepts and ideas” (p. 1). Intellect, according to Sowell, is not wisdom or intelligence, the latter being the combination of intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges” and wisdom being “the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding” (Ibid., p. 2). (A caveat: Neither Sowell nor I would confine intelligence to intellectual pursuits as there are various types of knowledge as for example the practical know-how of a carpenter, plumber, or mechanic.) And Sowell goes on to describe the record of twentieth century intellectuals as “appalling,” much as I have above: “Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not only in his own country, but also in foreign democracies, where people were free to say whatever they wished” (Ibid.). Sowell defines intellectuals as an “occupational category” including “writers, academics, and the like,” and excluding specialists such as brain surgeons, engineers, and financial wizards: An intellectual is “a dealer in ideas,” and “not the personal application of ideas, as engineers apply complex scientific principles to create physical structures or mechanisms” (p. 3).Unlike the latter, “An intellectual’s work begins and ends with ideas” (Ibid.). Intellectuals predominate in the social sciences, humanities, and journalism, generally in fields where there are no external standards to judge their ideas as there are in engineering, medicine, or finance. For example, in the latter, the bridge either stands or collapses, the patient either lives or dies, and the financier either makes or loses money. As a result, in those disciplines in which the intellectual predominates, “[t]he great problem – and the great danger – with purely internal criteria is that they can easily become sealed off from feedback from the external world of reality and remain circular in their methods of validation” (p. 7). I would submit that this is one way that false ideas such as socialism and Keynesianism survive to the degree that they do, but there is counter-evidence and that evidence is economic history. For example, as I’ve previously written: “History provides a laboratory for the effectiveness of economic theories and the results are overwhelmingly in capitalism’s favor: For example, compare East and West Germany, North and South Korea, the Soviet Union and the United States, China during Mao’s time with contemporary China.” However this may be so, the American socialist has never had to live in a purely socialist regime with brutal political repression such as those above, so he or she can maintain the fantasy that American socialism will somehow be different. As to Keynesian economics, its progeny the social welfare state is in the process of collapsing throughout the developed and Western World.

Another fascinating characteristic of intellectuals as a class is that they seldom confine their pronouncements to their field of competency but rather often assume that they know what is best for others in areas where they have no expertise. For example, Sowell wrote: “The fatal misstep of such intellectuals is assuming that superior ability within a particular realm can be generalized as superior wisdom or morality over all” (p. 12). In other words, competency in a particular area of knowledge does not necessarily translate into intelligence or wisdom in areas that one has little or no competency. For example, in my opinion Warren Buffett may be one of the greatest stock pickers in the world, but his competency does not even extend to the sister discipline of economics.

This phenomenon was driven home to me in 2000 when I read the Dalai Lama’s Ethics for the New Millennium (1999). While a rather useful book from a psychological perspective in terms of dealing with one’s emotional turmoil, it failed miserably when the Lama turned his attention to world affairs, an area in which I would submit that he has little or no expertise. His prescriptions were rather banal or trite. Likewise, we constantly hear Hollywood pseudo-intellectuals such as Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, or Bill Maher holding forth, often in a profane manner, about world affairs, the message usually being how intelligent and compassionate they are and how stupid the American public is. But in their case, intelligence and competency is hardly the issue as they are generally followers of intellectual fads, imbibed second hand through various populizers and journalists. After all, who reads Marx these days?

But even in areas in which they do have expertise, there is the tendency for intellectuals in the social sciences, for example, to overreach such as in the phenomenon of the central planning of an economy. Sowell takes his criticism of the hubris of central planners from Hayek, who elaborated on the theories of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. In Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (1920), for example, von Mises put forth the theory that pure socialism could never work because it had no price mechanism; in other words, without the market feedback of prices, how much people were willing to pay for things, producers could never ascertain how much of any good they should produce. Thus, as in the former Soviet Union, factories would produce an abundance of goods that nobody wanted to buy, and not enough of items that would otherwise have been in high demand. Hayek took this theory of von Mises and expanded it into a problem of knowledge. The problem with central planning was that no matter how smart the central planners may be, they could never plan a whole economy as efficiently as individual actors bidding for the products they wanted to buy with their own money. I’ll let Hayek speak for himself:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. (“The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, XXXV, No. 4; September, 1945, 519-30 )

In other words, there is no way that a person or group of persons could have enough information to plan all the intricate workings of an economy more efficiently than individual actors acting in their own self-interest. This is not to say that there are no other factors than economic self-interest to consider; rather, it is to say that a centralized government with the power and authority to make such decisions for the rest of the population will only tend to botch things up. The attempt of the Obama administration to pick winners and losers is just another example of why the economic model of central planning doesn’t work. Hayek calls this belief of many intellectuals that they can plan the perfect society “the fatal conceit.” It just doesn’t work: it not only fails to meet the objectives of a thriving economy; it replaces individual initiative and freedom with a form of government tyranny.

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