Stupid people

Why are there so many stupid people in high places?

No, I'm not talking about She Who Shall Remain Nameless. Or Dick Cheney. Not the obviously partisan crowd.

I'm talking about people whom you expect would be relatively balanced in their views and put the interest of the nation and its people first, ahead of politics. People like Alan Greenspan, who should have known better but who used his (unjustified) oracular mantle to make things go in the wrong direction.

Today, although he's not in the same league, I'm thinking of journalist/columnist/author Joe Klein. To many, he's something of a joke rather than a serious pundit. But Time Magazine has him as a commentator on national and international affairs.

I find this astonishing -- that someone who is not blinded by strong partisan allegiance but just got it so wrong anyway. But at least he is now saying that he was wrong. Here's what Klein wrote today in Time:

Columnists are paid to have opinions. Sometimes those opinions are wrong. Those two sentences are as obvious as a sunrise, but usually unspoken by my fellow opinionmongers. I can point you to many weeks of prescience and sheer genius in my work since I arrived at TIME in January 2003. But I think we'd learn more if we took a look at one of my goofs: I supported George W. Bush's idea of partially privatizing Social Security, which he tried to enact after he was re-elected in 2004. This was a close call for me at the time; it seems positively idiotic now that we've experienced the Great Recession — and the idea of private investment has finally regained proper perspective.

Investment is about risk; Social Security is about certainty.

A fair amount of certainty is crucial when it comes to retirement. Why, you might ask, was I blind to this simple proposition at the time?

He then explains that he had been highly critical of the "bloody futility of Bush's war in Iraq," and he was definitely opposed to his "demonstrably foolish supply-side philosophy that spawned his tax cuts."

Still, he was going to be my President for the next four years; my fellow citizens, and many of my readers, had voted him in. The partial privatization of Social Security was, he said, the top domestic priority for his second term. This seemed bold and politically risky. Scaring the elderly about cuts in their retirement benefits is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but Bush truly believed that if people could invest retirement savings in the market, they would end up with larger pensions. . . .And so did I, albeit with a truckload of caveats.

I never thought it was a good idea and never understood how thinking people could think it was a good idea. And my reasoning was exactly what Klein says now: "Investment is about risk; Social Security is about certainty."

Why didn't everybody see that? I'm no economist. It's just plain, simple, kitchen table common sense. Seems like the only people who talk about common sense are those like She Who Shall Remain Nameless who try to make education and expertise the villain and substitute "the will of the people" and "common sense," instead of elite, liberal academics.

What we need are experts who know all they need to know and ALSO use common sense.

Ralph