QotD: Experts

Experts can be and frequently are wrong. An expert working for the government is no less susceptible to bias or ill motivation as one working for a corporation. Which is why it's foolhardy to rely on their expertise when making top-down policies that affect everyone. In fact, the main difference between the two is that when a private corporation's experts are wrong, the consequences are generally limited to the corporation, its employees, and its investors (there are hard cases, of course. Pollution comes to mind. But hard cases make for bad policy.). When the government's experts are wrong, we all get to suffer the consequences. Which is a good reason to have government making as few one-size-fits-all policies as possible.

There was a time when government experts told us to eat lots of pasta. Not so much anymore. The "experts" at CSPI (who aren't the government, but are far too influential on it) once told us trans-fats were hunky-dory, and encourage restaurants to use them instead of butter and other animal fats. Now they say trans-fats are gelatinous death, and they're urging governments to ban them. Right now, government experts are generally lying to us about secondhand smoke, and using that "expertise" to call for public smoking bans. Same for medical marijuana. Government experts now tell us we're going to die if we don't lose a few pounds. But there's some evidence that dieting may be worse for you than carrying extra weight. There's now overwhelming scientific evidence that daily, moderate consumption of alcohol could add years to your life. Yet government experts continue to advocate top-down policies aimed at reducing alcohol consumption, because for whatever reason, they're more worried about the small percentage of people who abuse alcohol than the exponentially [higher] number of people who could benefit from it.

(It's also interesting how the government's preferred experts so often come to carefully-researched conclusions that call for giving more power to the government.)

Radley Balko, "Experts", TheAgitator.com, 2007-02-18