During the months before the invasion of Iraq, I often heard or read the claim that we had to defer to the government, because they “knew more” than the rest of us, which meant that if they claimed a dire threat was on the horizon there really was a dire threat on the horizon.  As it turned out, they knew scarcely more than the average well-informed citizen, and much of what they thought they knew was wrong.  There was a broad, international consensus of supposed experts that did not doubt the severity of what turned out to be a non-existent threat, and this consensus held despite an acknowledged lack of reliable information.  Indeed, the consensus thrived on the impossibility of proving a negative.  Except for a relative handful of dissenters, who were either ignored or dismissed as cranks, the people in the relevant policy community acquiesced or kept quiet, and the average citizen looked at the near-unanimity of supposed experts acknowledging the severity of the threat and took it far more seriously than he would have ever done otherwise.  Instead of asking who benefited from building up the threat, people were cowed into taking the threat for granted and accepting more or less unquestioningly government proposals for addressing it.  To be part of the mainstream conversation, one had to admit first of all that the threat was real and serious, at which point the debate was really already over.  

This strangely misplaced confidence in government expertise seems to have returned.  This time people seem to be inclined to defer to government claims because the situation really is quite serious and the problem at hand is fairly complex, which makes it much easier to confess a lack of expertise, yield to expert opinion and say, “Well, we have to trust the government–the alternative is unthinkable!”  If the last few years have shown anything, I would have thought they would have taught us to recognize this sort of browbeating as a means to shut down critical thought and skepticism.  The people who sold a war of choice as a war of necessity are now telling us that yet another emergency measure is absolutely necessary, which makes me think that it is distinctly possible that it is not.  The language of necessity in turn feeds the public’s fear that things must be so bad that they should not question the principle behind the emergency measure.  They can, as half-hearted critics of the invasion did, quibble about means and process, and at this point that is all we are seeing from most members of Congress, but they are not supposed to doubt the necessity of acting and acting now. 

At this point you might say, “But this is different, Larison.  The danger in this crisis is very real and serious–something must be done, the government is proposing to do something, so we may as well do that.”  It seems to me that this sort of response shows how similar the two cases are.  There is an assumption that if something must be done, this translates into calling for the government to use its coercive apparatus to intervene.  The logic is the same: unless you favor some kind of state action that will mainly benefit the state (in terms of power) and those connected to it (in terms of wealth), you want to stand by and do nothing at all.  More to the point, there is a presumption that action, even foolish, excessive action, is preferable to inaction.  In reality, however, taking precipitous action is almost always worse and yields all manner of unintended consequences that can be readily foreseen at the time.  There is also a fundamental problem that this administration cannot be trusted with the power it already has, much less new emergency powers that it wants to acquire, but this is not simply a question of whether this administration can be trusted.  In a few months, a new administration will begin, but I can already say with confidence that it should not be trusted with this kind of power, either, because concentrated and ultimately unaccountable power on this scale should never be granted to anyone in government. 

P.S. A useful thing to remember in the days to come: whenever someone yells about an impending catastrophe, he is probably either trying to sell you something or trying to steal something from you.  The mega-bailout is actually a case of trying to sell you on the idea that you should allow yourself to be robbed, so we should be even more wary.

Update: Donald Luskin makes a related point:

Yet there is ample room for doubt. The officials advocating this — Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke — are the same ones who, in similar haste, engineered interventions this year in the collapses of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and American International Group. With each intervention the banking crisis has gotten progressively more severe. Experts differ on this, but it is my professional judgment that these interventions actually made matters worse, because of the unintended consequences that were nearly impossible to forecast at the moment of decision. We simply cannot know what unintended consequences might be unleashed in the process of a massive acquisition of mortgage assets by the federal government.