Political stupidity from NPR OP ED

Last Monday, on the way to the MINI dealership with a flat tire, NPR had a story on the use of behavior psych applied to economics. They were discussing how human beings will take inherently illogical actions which are not always in their best interests. Standard economic models assume the perfectly logical decision maker and therefore are wrong. The conclusion was that government can and will be able to make the good long term choices for people, that those people would not make for themselves and might not even want. Thus, government SHOULD be doing more of that sort of thing. It's CLASSIC capital-L Liberalism.

I'm just curious if anyone else sees the big logical jumps they made?

First, they ASSUME that government WILL make better choices. The obvious first point is that government is made of people. The answer to refute this came from proof provided by the advocate being interviewed was that the British government, realizing that many tourists were being hit by cars every year because they were looking the wrong way on the streets, put up big signs to look to the right. It worked, ergo government will make smart choices. 1) The people would probably acknowledge this was in their best interest. 2) Looking left instead of right was a matter of habit and training; not exactly the sort of complex issues where minds may differ. 3) This is argument by analogy which is inherently a weak argument. For starters, you can always, as I have done in point 2 previously, show how the analogy does not fit. More importantly, for every example where government has done something smart like telling people to look right, I can probably come up with an example where government has done something colossally stupid like failing to check the seals on rockets it was suing to launch the space shuttle into orbit. The "look right" argument does not address the criticism that government decisions are still made by people, and if the problem is that people can be dumb, it applies to government. Worse, MOBS (a group of people) can often be dumber than a single person.

Second, the position advocated assumes that if government CAN make smarter decisions then it SHOULD and has the MORAL RIGHT to do so. I fail to follow that premise. Do we live in a society where being smarter gives someone a moral right to dominate the will of the less intelligent? Even if government can make a better decision than I can about something, do I want it to? This Orwellian road leads to tyranny. We can't trust you to pick the right kind of car, so we, the government, shall pick for you. Ignore what you want; we shall do what is best. We only need one kind of car anyway. (Ignore the kickback to the guy deciding what kind of car you should drive; he's smarter than you.) You don't want that job; you'd hate it. We shall decide what job you do. We shall decide where you shall live. We don't think you are raising your child in the smartest way so we, the government, shall raise the child for you.

What a Brave New World that would be.