Are Your Elected Officials Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

In earlier posts, I've strongly advocated universal legal equality and the government's obligation to ensure the common good of its citizenry.  These principles aren't particularly controversial, but there is room for significant debate as to how exactly to ensure the common good is pursued, and pursued in a manner commensurate with the preservation of legal equality and the freedoms demanded by the social contract between a people and its government.  The most successful approach to preserving these valuable, valuable things has been the implementation of representative democracy, in which we, the people, elect people who presumably are qualified to manage the affairs of state.  


The problem with popular elections is that most people aren't very smart.  Polybius noted that democracies tended to devolve into mob rule, which in turn devolved into a tyranny (Nazi Germany being perhaps the preeminent example of this principle).  All kinds of terrible ideas have garnered popular support (the world is flat, National Socialism, the death penalty for apostate Muslims in a number of countries, the stoning of adulterers in the same countries, the Crusades, McDonald's, American Idol, objectivism, neoconservatism, the Tea Party, communism, McCarthyism, protectionism, et cetera ad infinitum).  


Notably, popular elections have led to Senators who think that islands can capsize and Congresswomen  who think the founding fathers abolished slavery.  While there are doubtless many registered voters who would make the same mistake, those voters are not responsible for decisions regarding the development of infrastructure, the economic well-being of the largest economy in the world, health care, the continued solvency of the Federal Government, global climate change, the strategic posture of America's military, or international relations with the other nations of the world.  Whatever your particular stance on any of those issues may be, I think that we all can agree that decisions surrounding them will be difficult to come by, and require a great deal of thought and expertise.  


Significantly more expertise, I would say, than is demonstrated by people who don't understand how island work (they're like mountains, but an ocean covers all but the top of them) or the fundamentals of American history.  


It might be time to make the criteria for holding public office a little bit stricter, to encourage people who know things about science, economics, international relations, engineering, to start determining national policy, and to keep out the sort of riff raff who think islands float.