Chris Dillow: Managerialism and the Police State

More bitch-slaps for the managerialists at Stumbling and Mumbling. Chris Dillow suggests that Nulab's police statism can be explained by said managerialism.

In many walks of life, not just economic policy-making, there is a choice between using rules and using discretion. The choice often depends upon how much confidence you have in your ability to think rationally. If you think rationally is unbounded, you'll want to make ad hoc decisions, and use your discretion....

Blair... seems to reject the premise of bounded rationality and limited knowledge. He therefore thinks the state needn't be constrained by the rule of law, as it can do better by ad hoc interventions.

By the way, you ever notice how many apologists for the police state use the same ass-brained expression: "If you're not doing anything wrong, what have you got to worry about?" It implicitly assumes that the people engaged in electronic surveillance, warrantless searches, etc., mean well, and that the people running the state would never go after anyone who wasn't "doing anything wrong"--two characteristically managerialist assumptions, both quite unjustified, historically speaking.