Shovel Ready Credentialed Experts
Active Minds and Inactive Minds
It’s February. It’s New York City. And it’s snowing. A lot. Who better to manage this unprecedented crisis than a jihadi mayor who proved his manhood on the streets of New York by failing to bench press a very large, steel-colored cotton swab. As reported in Newsweek on February 22nd: “As the Big Apple faces its second snowstorm in less than a month and its first blizzard since 2016, the 34-year-old mayor announced on Saturday that emergency snow shovelers would be welcome to join the efforts of 1,000 such workers deployed.”
This seems reasonable enough, yet there is controversy over the requirement that eligible workers provide multiple forms of identification, “They normally also need to have two small photos, two original forms of ID, plus copies, and their Social Security card to register for an appointment.” In all fairness, this has been a long-standing policy, but useful nonetheless to illustrate the sanctimony of the mayor who won his election on communist ideals:
Critics are seizing on the ID rules to portray Mamdani as inconsistent, as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), to whom Mamdani belongs, has strongly stated in the past that it opposes voter-ID laws.
This may seem like a trivial case, because it is, and voting is about eligibility, not competence. But I begin with this story to illustrate the absurdity of credentialism; the belief that degrees, certifications, or titles conferred by State enabled institutions is proof of competence, excellence or integrity. It is not.
The collapse of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) markets in 2008 occurred because of State mandated AAA ratings. The insolvency of pension funds in 2003, 2008, and 2020 occurred because of State mandated capital market assumptions. But let’s talk about State mandated credentials for child-care workers.
Child-Care Providers
In December 2023, an associate’s degree became the requirement for eligibility as pre-school and child-care workers in Washington DC. Bear in mind, the greater Washington DC region is among the five wealthiest in America. That is because it has the greatest concentration of looters in world history: US Congressmen and Senators, federal agency bureaucrats, corporate lobbyists, federal labor union leaders, the wealthiest non-profits imaginable – and the State media syndicate to justify all of it.
Describing their arrogance fueled by the propaganda of good intentions was Frederic Bastiat, who wrote in 1850:
The sophism of the Socialists on this point is showing to the public what it pays to the intermediates in exchange for their services, and concealing from it what is necessary to be paid to the State. Here is the usual conflict between what is before our eyes, and what is perceptible to the mind only, between what is seen, and what is not seen.
What is not seen are the dire consequences of this government coercion on the people actually doing the work and the people who are consumers of these essential services, as witnessed by Positive Sum on Substack:
Formal daycare is already out of reach for many American families. One third to one half of employed parents of kids under five rely on friends, family, and neighbors. Requiring daycare workers to have degrees makes what looks like a luxury good, formal daycare, even more of a luxury good. It effectively outlaws cheaper versions of daycare.
It’s a good thing I don’t live in Washington, DC. I am a child-care worker, damn good at it, and my knowledge, talent and dedication exceed 99% of everyone in Washington who is collecting government salaries and benefits – for life.
But there’s more to the story about credentialed experts. Certifications and reputations do not confer honesty, integrity, or universal expertise. To be perfectly honest, an individual must never evade reality. That means someone who actively seeks better information and is willing to replace long-held beliefs with better ones. Integrity is the courage to think and act on one’s rationally adopted principles.
Academic Research Purveyors
Regarding expertise, progressive rock drummer Neil Peart said it best in a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone magazine: “what is a master but a student.” Regarding universally applied expertise, it is best to learn from the man who understood the universe - and expertise, better than anyone - quantum physicist Richard Feynman:
There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work.
At the governance level, witch doctors are those who choose public service as the safe career path for making the rules that sound good. Because the law of causality does not apply, no one is accountable - except those of us with skin in the game. This secular religion also collects indulgences and pays alms at the academic level, as Feynman observed:
It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Mayor Mamdani’s father is a professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University. Washington DC’s mayor and city council are social justice warriors. They are educators or they were educated at America’s “research universities.” They know linguistics. They know government grant writing. They know coercion. They need victims. Objective investors are independent - we are builders.