Bureaucrats and Facts

Mike has some interesting points about government scientists’ disdain of facts.

As I mentioned in my post "Is that a Fact?" science today has become an establishment and in an establishment facts don't matter. In her essay "The Establishing of an Establishment" 1972 Ayn Rand Letter about government support for the arts Miss Rand wrote "Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood."

We can see this principle unfold almost daily right before our eyes in all the disaster predictions of our "reputable" scientists, politicians and media. But if you ever doubted the veracity of her principle, the next quote should remove that doubt once and for all. From the article:

"Speaking on a panel that included the agency's (EPA) current chief, Stephen Johnson, they generally agreed that the need to address global warming is growing urgent, and that the continuing debate over what percentage of the problem is caused by human activities is a waste of time.

'Why argue about things you can't prove?' said William D. Ruckelshaus, who served under Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973 and Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985."

There you have it. "Why argue about things you can't prove" lets just go ahead and ram our agenda down the peoples' throats with a congressional gun. Facts? Truth? Falsehood? They're just "a waste of time."

Environmentalist bureaucrats act like philosopher kings who know better than everyone else because they have a special insight into the realm of platonic ideals. (Mike also makes a good point about Ruckelshaus and the DDT ban.)