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Comment by repolfx | Hacker News Reader

Economists are famous for repeatedly making predictions that turn out to be hugely wrong, groupthink and massive political biases. Don't think so somehow.

As for scholars in political theory, laughable. What does an ivory tower academic know about what people want or need? Marx spent his entire life reading books and writing political theory and his ideas lead to disaster everywhere.

Nope. Allowing anyone to take part is a great system.

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I absolutely agree that rule by ideologue is terrible. I'm not sure I agree that universal suffrage democracy is a good method of preventing ideological theocracy. How many of those voters are under the spell of charismatic ideological propagandists?

Can you offer specific examples that make you believe that the cumulative opinion of scholars are going to be objectively worse than the cumulative opinion of everyone?

Communism was essentially dictatorship of political theorists. People like Lenin, Marx, Trotsky and even Stalin had all written books on political theory. It led to mass starvation, dystopia and economic collapse.

The USA went with cumulative opinion of everyone (democracies, markets).

Which country is the world's remaining superpower?

Both the US and China are superpowers. One sort of capitalist/representative, one sort of communist/oligarchical.

Maybe it just means that extremes don't really work that well.

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