Thursday, November 09, 2006

If you could be governed by one group of people...

EconLog was posting some libertarianist rhetoric (big surprise), but raised a brilliant question in the post script to the post:

William F. Buckley famously said that "I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University". As for me, I would rather be governed by the current membership of the American Economic Association than by the millions of people who voted on Tuesday.
-EconLog

Suppose we were going to randomly pick a few hundred people to run the country, and you got to choose where we drew the sample from. Would you choose:
a) Ivy League Professors
b) the general populace
c) Economists
d) Politicians
e) Christians
f) the very wealthy
g) ...?