In his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Princeton economist Alan Blinder has a number of silly suggestions for improving federal economic policy but this is by far the most fatuous:
I have one final suggestion, though its scope is limited: Suppose we took some—certainly not most—economic decisions out of the hands of politicians, and put them in the hands of nonpolitical technocrats instead.
because economists are uniformly dispassionate automatons without political preferences or prejudices or ideologies of their own. Who are these philosopher-kings?
Why not put all health care policy in the hands of physicians, business policy in the hands of a committee of big business executives, and our Middle East policy in the hands of Middle East experts? If we continued in the vein we wouldn’t need legislatures or elections at all.
Let me answer Dr. Blinder explicitly. The reason we do not put economic decisions “in the hands of nonpolitical technocrats” is that there are no nonpolitical technocrats.
