I need to think about this more, but there seems to be some insights burbling up in the infosphere that relate to the experts/expertise distinctions discussed in several earlier posts. Authoritarians don't like democracy, much less markets.

As is well-known, the supposed virtues of a free market can easily be questioned. Many thoughtful and informed observers are skeptical toward unrestrained markets or are self-consciously opposed to the concept of a liberal market. The solution to financial crises is in their eyes, a fencing in of the market by the state and society.

Much less common, however, as Lindblom also stresses, if not taboo, is an open and explicit expression of doubt about the virtues of democracy, with the obvious exception of certain leaders of decidedly undemocratic nations. In particular, it has traditionally been the case that scientists rarely have raised serious misgivings in public about democracy as a political system.

But the times are changing. Within the broad field of climatology and climate policy one is able to discern growing concerns about the virtues of democracy. It is not just the deep divide between knowledge and action that is at issue, but it is an inconvenient democracy, which is identified as the culprit holding back action on climate change. As Mike Hulme has noted , it can be frustrating to learn that citizens have minds of their own.

Leading climate scientists insist that humanity is at a crossroads. A continuation of present economic and political trends leads to disaster if not collapse. To create a globally sustainable way of life, we immediately need in the words of German climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a "great transformation." What exactly is meant by the statement is vague. Part, if not the heart of this great transformation is in the eyes of some climate scientists as well as other scientists part of the great debate about climate change a new political regime and forms of governance: "We need an authoritarian form of government in order to implement the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas emissions" according to the Australian scholars David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith their book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. The well-known climate researcher James Hansen adds resignedly and frustrated as well as vaguely, "the democratic process does not work". In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, James Lovelock emphasizes that we need to abandon democracy in order to meet the challenges of climate change head on. We are in a state of war. In order to pull the world out of its state of lethargy, the equivalent of a global warming "nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech is urgently needed.

OK, this is the lunatic fringe, but I suspect that they get a fair amount of sympathy, especially from those who are susceptible to the "libertarian paternalist" trope.

markets actually give people incentives to act more rationally than they would otherwise, thus undercutting claims of irrational behavior based primarily on surveys or experiments that don’t mimic the incentives and other conditions of real-world markets:

People, including economists, are imperfect decision makers because of their mental limitations. But this fact does not mean that markets fail. Indeed, markets do far more than induce improved allocation of resources, given wants and resources. Markets induce market participants to be more rational than they otherwise would be because they must pay a price for being irrational. Thus, markets allow—no, require—economists to assume that people are more rational than they are likely to be found to be in laboratory settings, absent meaningful information and incentives and absent market pressures.

One underappreciated fact about the experimental and survey evidence relied on by advocates of the new paternalism is that it models voter decision-making far more closely than market decisions. Unlike market participants, voters have little or no incentive to either acquire information about the issues they decide, or to analyze the information they do have in an unbiased fashion. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of libertarian paternalist policies established by expert regulators insulated from democratic control (the “rule of experts” is often proposed as a means by which paternalist regulation can be enacted without being influenced by voter ignorance and irrationality). Such regulators may be more knowledgeable than voters. But unlike consumers, they do not have their own money at stake, and therefore don’t suffer any penalty if they make mistakes, and don’t have much incentive to combat any irrational biases they may have.

By advocating increased government intervention in order to combat irrationality, the paternalists are arguing for a transfer of power to decision-making processes where irrationality is likely to be greater than it is in markets. The proposed cure actually exacerbates the disease. . .

Ultimately, there is little doubt that market participants are sometimes irrational. The problem is that government decision-makers are likely to be more so.

Likely? Certainly. Over time decisions would grow ever more irrational. It's The Problem of Organizations

The subtle problem that organizations and institutions pose to contemporary life is that people who live inside an institutional culture often are so sensitive to the nuances of the way things work, the limits and possibilities of change within the institution, that they let problems and failures slide or pass. No one wants to be that guy, the one who rants about everything. And that’s what often happens to someone inside an institution who blows the whistle on a bad practice or a growing issue, because that often ends with that person in a kind of internal exile, and in that circumstance, a loss of a sense of proportion is all but inevitable. Everything will come to look suspect or corrupt.

Institutions often resist external monitoring for the same reason. Institutional actors really do know things about how and why things work inside their worlds that outsiders don’t know. Precisely because a lot of that knowledge is about culture, about the unspoken patterns of everyday life, it can’t just be made transparent by providing documents or access. A monitoring group which gains an intimate knowledge of that interior culture of their target of scrutiny becomes a part of that culture in the process, loses perspective. A monitoring group which maintains a steely, formal distance from that kind of knowledge tends to constantly screw up processes which are working well, to create formalities and record-keeping requirements which become a burden without providing a service, and to be presumptively hostile to the organization they monitor even when it’s not warranted.

And of course outside monitors are themselves institutions, and just as prone to developing arteriosclerotic rot in their own procedures and internal culture. No institution wants to be monitored by another institution which may become just as fallible or broken.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all that. It reminds of Dr. Seuss’ image of a world full of people holding the tail of the person in front of them.

Due to recent posts the sticky brain plaques formed by the abnormal accumulation of beta amyloids that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease come to mind. Institutions get senile. Democracy and markets seem to be a way to spawn fresh institutions not yet crufted up with sticky brain plaques.