(08-15-2019 08:19 AM)bullet Wrote:  https://www.realclearmarkets.com/article...03850.html

Progressives have a love for "experts."

"A frequent theme in this column is one about the fallability of the brilliant. Jeff Bezos regularly acknowledges how often his experiments prove much less than great, the best venture capitalists admit that more than nine out of ten capital commitments result in bankruptcy, and then the world's best traders note that they're wrong almost as often as they're right. It's incredibly difficult to predict the future, and that's an understatement.

This truism came to mind while reading Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell’s lament about the Department of Agriculture’s recent decision to relocate the Economic Research Service (ERS) from Washington, D.C. to Kansas City. Rampell reports that in response to the announced change, only 116 ERS employees had agreed to move. The columnist is up in arms....


Indeed, it’s not as though “experts” uniquely work in government in Washington, D.C. Readers can rest assured that Fidel Castro’s Cuba had its share of experts high up in government, same in Mao’s China, and surely in Stalin’s Russia. Of course, the previous truth didn’t mean that hunger, starvation, murder and relentless misery didn’t broadly define life in countries ruled by experts. Brilliant as experts might be, they’ll never know even a fraction of what markets do. ..."

I’m just sitting here wondering why, in this age of labor saving devices aplenty, we really need more than 116 employees in the Economic Research Service.