Dear Friends,
It seems to me, examples of top-down ideas imposed on the people are myriad, while the successes can be counted on one hand… one missing fingers. Some notable examples are China’s one child policy, Bernays convincing women to smoke, and putting lead in gasoline. All ideas that came from experts which were imposed on the people and led to disaster. These are but a few of the thousands of other examples of ideas that the experts thought were brilliant but were in fact stupid… like experts introducing the cane toad to Australia. The elite constantly make this mistake. Consent and consensus are often manufactured to some elitist end. Meanwhile, all actual progress has been organic, from the bottom up. The elite see what common people do and think they can do better.
Why wouldn’t the elite believe they can engineer the future better than the commoners organically grow it? The elite have experts, unlimited funding, and industrial production to get their ideas done. How could they fail? Yet that’s all they do…. fail. No matter how much other people’s money they spend, the expertise at their fingertips and human lives ground in the gears, the notions of the elite create suffering on an industrial scale. How is it then that almost all growth comes from the bottom and grows up? The little guy has an obstacle course of regulations, naysayers and cost of capital in his way. Yet the entrepreneur succeeds far more than government or corporations, for that matter. One is set up for success and the other destined for failure, even as outcomes belie the set up.
One advantage the entrepreneur has is that she has no advantages. She has to fight tooth and nail for every penny, and as a result, she’s pragmatic, flexible and aware. Even as the government-backed expert couldn’t care less about cost, an idealist isn’t flexible and is deaf to anything but his own ideas. The entrepreneur has skin in the game while the bureaucrat doesn’t. That’s why she’s pragmatic and the bureaucrat isn’t. Plus, the entrepreneur has to be creative, because creativity is the source of innovation. While creativity is incompatible with bureaucracy. Then there’s distributed knowledge. A small business owner has access to information denied to a bureaucrat. The fact is, entrepreneurs are destined for success while bureaucrats are destined for failure. Proved by the history of top-down failures.
At the turn of the Twentieth Century, the world was abuzz with innovation. There were plenty of investors looking to electrify the world, but no one had an idea how to do it. Edison wanted to use DC power but the technology eluded him. DC can’t be easily stepped up in voltage for transmission or down for home use. Tesla entered the picture with a brilliant vision about AC, (Alternating Current) that could easily be stepped up for transmission and down for home use, was perfect. So much so, Edison went on a propaganda campaign to smear Tesla’s “deadly” current. In the end, it was Tesla’s AC that electrified America. Not because of a top-down edict and diligent work by bureaucrats and experts, but because of one brilliant guy, an immigrant, who changed the world for the better.
When the elite try to make the world better, we get the one child policy, eugenics and Covid. Now they want us to eat bugs. Because the experts think that will be better… like they thought the clot shot was safe and effective. The fact is, top-down anything always leads to disaster. You can’t blame the experts, politicians or executives, they’re caught up in their own propaganda. I imagine many people at Davos think they’re doing great work there. While the bureaucrats at the UN honestly believe Agenda 2030 will result in a golden age. Just as Pol Pot thought all he needed to do to create utopia was to eliminate a class of people. The goals always glitter… and the outcomes are hell on Earth. That’s why top-down ideas, and the power of the elite to implement them should be severely limited.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
