Everyone is probably familiar with the normal distribution, the bell curve. An important point to emphasize: the bell curve is merely observable fact. It is not an opinion, not a theory, and in no way political. Many things in life are normally distributed: human height, weight, SAT scores, etc. It causes a lot of consternation among some people, but intelligence is one such normally distributed attribute. The rest of this article is opinion, but it will bear itself out in experience with any visit to a DMV or similar government agency.
Government generally attracts people right in the middle of the bell curve. The outliers to the right most likely find more success and less restraints on their potential in the private sector and the outliers on the left, the actual morons and criminals, are (hopefully) screened out in the hiring process. That very average portion of the population that enters government service has it’s VERY OWN bell curve: the Government Service Bell Curve. The outside observer would hope, and expect, that the people leading government agencies would come from the outliers on the right side of that bell curve, perhaps 1 or 2 standard deviations plus. From my experience, I can assure you that is a rare occurrence. The name of the game for government and any large enough organization is “don’t rock the boat.” Novel thinkers are a liability, not an asset. In the private sector, exceptional people can leave the stifling confines of a rigid company and defect to their nimbler competition or create their own enterprise and then emerge as the competition. With government, there is no competition so you get with the program or find a new line of work!
Regrettably, in government, it is the middle of the bell curve that rises to the top. The most exceptionally average of a very average cohort. When people plea for government intervention and seek out government advice, they should be cautioned to bear in mind that fact. This is a great argument for the libertarian goal of smaller government: the people in government are probably idiots so lets make government as small and powerless as possible.
The example of the hour has to be the World Health Organization, a supra-governmental health agency which must mean… a collection of the most average health experts from ACROSS THE GLOBE! Read this for a summary of their recent misadventures. As you do, remember Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Do your own research, come to your own conclusions, be wary of experts trotted out by any government.
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