I have posted more than once that the average human is a dullard and therefore, cannot be expected to make good political, or any other decision.
"One in Five Brits Think Light Sabers Exist."
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/14/survey-reveals-britons-believe-sci-fi-technologies-already-exist/
I suspect that the results of the survey would be about the same for people in the U.S.
There are a lot of idiots out there, but...
"The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fairly accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).[1]
The book relates to diverse collections of independently-deciding individuals, rather than crowd psychology as traditionally understood. Its central thesis, that a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts, draws many parallels with statistical sampling, but there is little overt discussion of statistics in the book."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
Of course that author was not the first to come up with that idea in 2004. The invisible hand of Adam Smith was described in 1776.
"The theory of the Invisible Hand states that if each consumer is allowed to choose freely what to buy and each producer is allowed to choose freely what to sell and how to produce it, the market will settle on a product distribution and prices that are beneficial to all the individual members of a community, and hence to the community as a whole. The reason for this is that self-interest drives actors to beneficial behavior. Efficient methods of production are adopted to maximize profits. Low prices are charged to maximize revenue through gain in market share by undercutting competitors. Investors invest in those industries most urgently needed to maximize returns, and withdraw capital from those less efficient in creating value. Students prepare for the most needed (and therefore most remunerative) careers. All these effects take place dynamically and automatically."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
Put a hundred bureaucrats in office and you will have among them a number of idiots wreaking havoc with our economy and lives. Put one bureaucrat in charge of everything and no matter how smart he is he will not perform as well as an invisible hand in creating a fair and just society.
The reason is that for an invisible hand to work each individual must be working independently of everyone else. The last thing a bureaucracy does is work independently of the wishes of the rulers or of their supporters.
