RALEIGH — United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, in Iraq with President Bush’s support to help negotiate the formation of a provisional government to stand until 2005 elections, seems to have failed in his stated objective to assemble a government of technocrats to run the Iraqi state. The new prime minister was a longtime Saddam Hussein opponent and political activist. Brahimi’s failure is good news all around, and even offers a related lesson to North Carolina politicians.
I surprised that few commentators have picked up on Brahimi’s frequent use of the term “technocrats” and sought to explain further just what he is talking about. As a former official of a centralized state (Algeria) and the current agent of a corrupt and centralized bureaucracy (the UN), Brahimi no doubt knows exactly what he means. A technocrat is not defined as simply someone who doesn’t want to run for political office, though that may be true and is being interpreted as Brahimi’s original intention (see this month-old link for some background, including some interesting back-and-forth among Iraqi Governing Council members once thought about to play more significant roles).
A technocrat is a social engineer. The concept of “technocracy” got its start in America in the early 20th century as an outgrowth of the Institutionalist school of economics founded by University of Chicago scholar Thorstein Veblen. He was of the opinion that the major economic and social problems left for modern societies to solve were of a technological nature. Businessmen, he thought, were worse than useless, as were the price signals, advertising, and “conspicuous consumption” he saw as embedded in the “wasteful” market process. Technocrats, armed with scientific knowledge and possessing the latest government statistics, could make better decisions about how best to allocate resources to their most productive use.
This wasn’t just incorrect. It was disastrously wrong-headed — incoherent in theory and impossible in practice. Producers of goods and services must use market prices, the real-world demands of consumers expressed in money, to guide their decisions. There is no substitute. And social problems don’t lend themselves to engineering solutions. Human beings aren’t just points on a graph or files in a cabinet (or, today, on the computer). They are rational actors with their own interests, motivations, and capacities to learn and grow.
There are certainly engineering problems in Iraq. But there are plenty of educated people there capable of solving them, just as there have been many educated people in hosts of socialist and fascist states that have failed. What is needed is a set of social institutions that foster effective cooperation and coordination of human action. That’s the rule of law, not the arbritrary rule of the gun, and the spontaneous order of competitive markets, not smart guys running a bureacracy in Baghdad.
So what’s the connection to North Carolina? Plenty of politicians are worried about the changes underway in the state’s economy. That’s understandable. But too many of them think that some smart guys and gals in Raleigh can figure out the right set of industries to create jobs, and even the right set of companies in which to invest money to make it happen. This is Veblen’s old engineering paradigm at work again. Or not at work again, if you think about it.
Down with technocracy. Up with democracy, and not just at the ballot box. Let regular folks vote every day, with their purchases and their entrepreneurial endeavors. The process will be messier than a technocrat’s diagrams, but far more successful.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.