I'm certainly not the first to make this observation.  Logicians going back to Aristotle and probably prior, have warned us about the potential tyranny of experts that can arise in any society.  Even people with credentials can be wrong.  Einstein made mistakes.  When William F. Buckley joked, a long time ago, that he would rather be ruled by a random sampling from the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard, he did have something of a point.

But there are some influential people out there who love credentialed folk and who are enamored with the idea that we will somehow be able to find the right mix of technocratic geniuses to lead us towards sustainable prosperity, both as a society and as a collection of individuals.  Thomas Friedman, who has been on a roll lately, revealed a bit too much, I think, in his newest column, where he says:

"...the Internet, the blogosphere and C-Span’s coverage of the workings of the House and Senate have made every lawmaker more transparent — making back-room deals by lawmakers less possible and public posturing the 24/7 norm."

This is a stunning admission, I think.  When most Americans talk about "back-room deals," they aren't wistful about some bygone era where the big decisions were made not only without input from the public, but without the public knowing.  Heck, the left's deftest critique of Obama's healthcare plan was that the President relied too heavily on backroom dealing.  For example, he bought the acquiescence of the pharmaceutical industry was bought by the promise that the government would not use its monopsony position in the market to bring down drug prices.

What Friedman wants is for the people to get out of the way.  He spends the bulk of his column criticizing "special interests."  But he doesn't do much to define them.  It seems as if special interests are really nothing more than people who disagree with Thomas Friedman.

Friedman posits that there is some sort of silent majority that is, "fixated on the well-being of the country as a whole," but he doesn't give us any sense of who those people are, or how he knows their motives.

Near the end of his column, he points out something important, which is that the U.S. didn't rise to economic prominence because of the free market, but rather because of public (government) support for American industry.  There's no doubt he's right about that.

But let's back up to that quote about back-room deals.  The problem with government support for industries is that it's inherently unfair.  For a variety of reasons, some pragmatic and some because of influence and power, the government will always pick Goldman Sachs over the local hardware store.  In the olden days, people knew the fix was in, but they didn't always have the details.  These days, the public can get (usually after years of delay) enough information to form constitute a blow by blow account of why one bank got a bailout, another didn't, and why the local hardware store didn't even make it into the discussion.

To Friedman, this new transparency makes it impossible for the smart people to make the unpopular decisions.  In short, there was a time before all of this damned media when the people couldn't complain in a timely fashion because they didn't know.

But, what are they complaining about?  As I hear them, a lot of the complaints are about fairness.  Timothy Geithner has his reasons, but I doubt he'd claim that the government was fair in its post financial crisis dealings.  It certainly did not treat all interested parties equally.  Companies outside of financial services and automobile manufacturing were allowed to fail without a hint of government assistance.  It seems to me that Friedman would view this as an unhelpful discussion.  Friedman is more concerned that money is allocated the way the experts say it should be, than he is about fairness.  What he explicitly doesn't want is for ordinary people to stick up for their own interests.  But what's expedient isn't always what's fair.

What's funny is that, in the end, I agree with what Friedman wants -- changing the Senate rules so that more bills get to an up and down vote seems like a no-brainer to me.  But, he also wants the budget to be:

"drawn up by a much smaller supercommittee of legislators — like those that handle military base closings — with 'heavy technocratic input from a nonpartisan agency like the Congressional Budget Office,' insulated from interest-group pressures and put before Congress in a single, unamendable, up-or-down vote."

Sounds very efficient.  And, heck, if the supercommittee, likely made up of people not from your state, meaning that they never have to answer to you in an election, along with the CBO, come to conclusion that you (Thomas Friedman) likes, then it's awesome.  But, if they come to conclusions that you don't like... you have no recourse at all!

There's no nice way to put it. Thomas Friedman believes in less democracy for America.  That's just sad.