Monopoly on Wisdom

We have a country ruled by our wisest. For many, that’s a country right side up. In the 5th century B.C., Athens was a democracy, a polity offensive to the city’s oligarchy, including the philosopher Plato [see bust]. Plato instead favored minority rule, but not by the wealthy, rather by an educated elite that foreswore the pursuit of money. Much like the ideals of the current anti-business, pro-government, Democratic Party elite.

When people believe one class is more fit to rule than others, in my opinion they move us away from democracy and toward meritocracy, from democratic Athens to Plato’s republic. And today, the educated and articulate Obama reigns, the modern version of Plato’s philosopher king.

Janet Daley, writing in the Telegraph (U.K.), gets at why Obama has such a hold over our national elite:

Exceptionally articulate politicians begin with a great electoral advantage because the opinion-forming class is in love with words: to adapt WH Auden, it

worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives.

As Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn writes,

liberal[s assume] they have a monopoly on brain power. . . anyone who dissents, almost by definition, has to be stupid . . . Obama inadvertently encourages [this view] when he [tells] his town halls. . . he's received a letter from a woman upset with his plans for health care. "She said, 'I don't want government-run health care. I don't want you meddling in the private market place. And keep your hands off my Medicare.'" Get it? The applause tells us the audience does: How dumb can this woman be?

Fouad Ajami, the committed Johns Hopkins supporter of Middle East democracy, has seen in the health care debate the same elite arrogance that drew McGurn’s attention:

So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. . .A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

Going back over three decades, we have, from liberal Stanford economist Victor Fuchs’ 1976 article "From Bismarck to Woodcock: The 'Irrational' Pursuit of National Health Insurance," an indication of why health care may be so central to those who believe in government control of our country’s life:

one of the most effective ways of increasing allegiance to the state is through national health insurance. We live at a time when many of the traditional symbols and institutions that held a nation together have been weakened and fallen into disrepute. A more sophisticated public requires more sophisticated symbols, and national health insurance may fit that role particularly well.

The health industry isn’t the whole economy, but it’s one-sixth, an important beginning.