Jonah Goldberg, National Review
According to New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his mega-best-selling book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, China banned plastic bags a few years ago. Bam! Just like that 1.3 billion people, theoretically, will stop using thin plastic bags, he gushed. Millions of barrels of petroleum will be saved, and mountains of garbage avoided.
Chinas got us beat, suggests Friedman, because its leaders arent hung up on democracy, checks and balances, or any of the other dusty old impediments found in the American system. Friedman has proclaimed his envy for Chinas authoritarian system countless times. Its why he titled one of the chapters in his book China for a Day. The idea he calls it his fantasy is that if we could just be China for a day, the experts could impose by diktat what they cannot win through democratic debate.
If only the Founding Fathers had included an annual Tyranny Day in the Constitution. Every 364 days America could debate and scheme, pitting faction against faction, government branch against government branch, and on the 365th day the Supreme Soviet of the United States could simply do things that are tough and shove ten pounds of policy awesomeness into democracys five-pound bag.
Now, just for the record, China hasnt banned plastic bags. Just ask anybody whos been to China recently. But what a strange thing to sell your soul for. What was it Thomas More said It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but to ban plastic bags?...
But its also worth noting that Friedman is hardly alone. He may stretch his argument to the point of parody, but he shares a widespread view that the experts have all the answers and the system is holding them back.
Such arguments are as old as they are dangerous. And they are arrogant beyond description. People like Friedman automatically assume that their preferred policies are so obviously right, so objectively enlightened, that theres no need to debate them or vote on them.
Such arguments are usually deployed to avoid valid criticisms, not because there are none. Indeed, the Obama White House virtually lives by such claims. All of the experts agreed that their stimulus would work, that Obamas version of health-care reform was both necessary and popular, and that weaning the U.S. from fossil fuels would create green jobs. The evidence on all of these fronts is mixed or weak, yet the president constantly insists that he doesnt want to hear from people who disagree with him on these issues because all the facts are in.
Such arrogance is dangerous. The literature on the unintended consequences of policies crafted by experts is at least as old as the field of economics. Frédéric Bastiat, the great 19th-century economist, noted all that separated the good economist from the bad is the ability to appreciate the possibility of the unforeseen. Nobel Prizewinning economist Friedrich Hayek demonstrated that healthy economies couldnt be controlled by experts, because the experts will always have a knowledge problem. They can never know all of the variables and never fully predict how their theories will play out in reality.
Right now, Congress is debating a financial-reform bill that simply commands that regulators predict when an unforeseen crisis will occur. This is like demanding that regulators know when stocks will go up or down. If they knew that, they wouldnt be regulators theyd be billionaires.
But forget all that. Lets get back to those evil plastic bags. A new study from the University of Arizona reveals that reusable shopping bags, the enlightened replacement for plastic ones, are breeding grounds for E. coli and other dangerous bacteria. Roughly 50 percent of the bags inspected were found to contain dangerous, potentially lethal, bacteria.
No, this doesnt mean we should abandon reusable bags, let alone ban them on next years Tyranny Day. People can clean the bags and solve the problem. Thats a hassle, to be sure. But thats the point. Theres always going to be a downside to even the best policies, because the experts dont know as much as they think they do. Sometimes, they dont even know theyre not experts at all. 
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