(tense contemplative music) - [Narrator] For 100 years, we've been the guinea pigs
in a grand experiment. Can managers, experts and
bureaucrats more efficiently plan and run our lives than we can? Does society flourish when a select few determine
the path for the many? Experts are critical to
evaluating, judging, and planning, but shouldn't we be in
charge of our own lives? (static hisses) - [Announcer] Let's start
with you and what you want. (soft bright music) What does anybody want? Millions have worshiped the strong man. Millions let somebody else decide what they want by fear, by force. (speaks in foreign language) (crowd yells) Yeah, a dictator. Over here, we don't like dictators. Our government represents us, the people. Our government is our
servant, not our master, and it makes a lot of difference to you what you can do and what you can't do. Limitations of our rights? Sure. But for the public good, and that's the way our
country has gone ahead. (static hisses)
(contemplative music) - It was the year of
science, turn of the century. Every day, new ideas came out. Society was changing much more rapidly than it ever had before. An important figure was Speedy,
Frederick Winslow Taylor. Speedy was his nickname, and Speedy was the great efficiency expert who helped us to get the assembly line. - Industry was this
enormous thing that erupted during that time, and apparently, Taylor could improve productivity. (flames rumble)
(muffled speaking) - He would observe industrial processes, and he would figure out how
to make them more efficient. - [Narrator] The guy was obsessed
with scientific precision. His own peers called him authoritarian because he brought that obsession with precision into everything he did. He believed everything,
especially factory work, could be perfected through science. - [Amity] One of the places
Frederick Taylor worked was at Bethlehem Steel, where they were trying
to get more productivity out of a worker. - [Narrator] And as
providence would have it, the Spanish-American War sparked a surge in demand for American steel. Large demand for steel means
Bethlehem Steel Company must move product, 80,000 tons off the train
cars and into the yard. In fact, they were
struggling in comparison to other steel plants. The workers were already the lowest paid and likely a third as efficient. With a desperate need to
improve Bethlehem Steel and a theory that could change everything, this was Frederick's time to strike. - Frederick Winslow Taylor was the founder of scientific management. Why don't we figure out
what's the one best way, the one best sequence of
actions to get this, that, or the other task done
in this large factory? - Taylor believed that we
could all do things better, and that's fine, and factories
could be more productive. Definitely true. But he also believed that
people need to be categorized. He actually said, "Some people are stupid. They're like oxen. They
need to work an ox's job. Other people are bright.
They need their college men. They need to study the
oxen and help the oxen and order the ox around." - So that was the principle
of Taylorism is top down. "Science is what makes me
a legitimate authority, and you who don't have science
must be totally disempowered. You're just cluttering the system." - [Narrator] It was Frederick's theory of scientific management
that made this possible. Take any job and reduce
it to its simplest, most efficient tasks, steps, and motions, and motivate the right person to work as efficiently as possible. Most of these men collapsed from working too hard and refused to complete Taylor's first
experiments in efficiency. Taylor later found one in particular who could outperform the rest. A Pennsylvania Dutchman
Frederick had nicknamed Schmidt was all he needed to prove his theory. Frederick had Schmidt hustling up and down wooden planks
to achieve his goal, and in a single day, Schmidt achieved what took the average worker
an entire week's work. Taylor took backbreaking work and made it extremely
profitable for his career. Taylor's cult of scientific
efficiency was born. - [Amity] Taylorism was enormously popular because the early progressives
were after progress. - [Narrator] Harvard, Penn State, Cornell, Purdue all converted his lectures into the world's first MBA programs where influential intellectuals were eager to impose an ideology that,
not only can every corner of society be planned and controlled from the top down, but that it must be. - The progressives
really took this question of national efficiency, and they took Taylor's ideas
and they saw applications of those ideas well beyond the plant. Taylor himself says, "We
can apply this not just to industrial management, but we can apply it to religion. We can apply it to private philanthropies. We can apply it to the farms." It was an economic idea,
but then there were people during The Progressive Era
in the early 20th century who said, "This is an
idea really that applies across a whole range of
things, including politics." - The progressives were one of the first intellectual
movements that viewed society as a big company, let's say, or just a big organization
that needs to be managed. - Taylorism then became
the idea that the expert can come along, tell the
non-expert how to do it, whatever it might be. - It essentially believed
that if you had enough science and enough power, you could
fix the human condition. (dark brooding music) - I think Taylor's ideas led directly to the enshrinement of expert government, the idea that experts should be involved in making all of the decisions. - [Narrator] Everything we do suddenly requires more scientific
management. Personal hygiene, diet, child rearing, housing, posture, recreation, family structure. - And I think the 20th
century took that model into its politics. - [Narrator] Government control. - The idea is that that we human beings are there to be controlled, and there is a scientific
way for us to be, and then they use this information when making their directives to us. They issue their commands based
upon what they've learned. That's the big mistake.
That's the category mistake. A country is not a company. - [Narrator] And we would continue to read what the world's first
management expert sowed. Within a few decades of
Frederick's experiments, the consent of the government was about to be delegated to the experts. Revolution had ripped through Russia, and Vladimir Lenin had a
worm in his stomach for more, but food and power were scarce, and things were only getting worse. Having lost many skilled
workers during the Revolution, he needed a system that could
turn malnourished peasants into red-blooded factory workers. Lenin's solution was a managerial economy. - It must have dawned on
him how congenial that was to that entire structure
that he had erected of political power. The Communist party is the
ultimate Taylorist organization. If you ever saw how things
worked in the Soviet Union, to the bitter end, it was this little group
of people take over, and they, through science
and expertise and technology, dominate everybody else. - [Narrator] When Stalin
took Lenin's seat of power, the Soviet Russia represented
the ultimate expression of Frederick Taylor's idea, a complete scientifically managed state. The promise of
scientifically precise order and efficiency excited them,
but they weren't the only ones. - American progressives
weren't getting very far when it came to politics in the 1920s. Nobody was paying attention to them, and they wanted to be admired,
and over in the Soviet Union, larger scale experiments were
going on, and at one point, Soviet leaders invited
American progressives, particularly people in the
union movement, to come over and admire the Soviet Union
for a fancy junket trip. - [Narrator] Basically
a glorified field trip to admire the Soviet Union's achievements up close and personal. - In 1927, a group of
progressives went to Russia. They went over on a boat
called the Roosevelt, named after Theodore Roosevelt. - [Narrator] Stalin's guest
list included an assortment of journalists, intellectuals,
and labor leaders. Among them were two fanboys
of Taylor's writings, Rexford Tugwell, an economist
who saw a great need to reform American agriculture, which he believed was too
inefficient and wasteful, and Stuart Chase, a social
theorist who believed that engineers should be
in charge of government and run society like a machine. Both saw much potential
in the centralized economy of the Soviet experiment, and the timing of their visit
couldn't have been better. But even with a generous audience, Soviet leaders still had a lot to hide. - You're not getting recognition at home. You think you deserve recognition. You go over to Russia and
they unroll the red carpet. (dramatic music with Russian vocals) (dramatic music) - [Narrator] What they didn't know was that Stalin meticulously
planned every detail of their tour, the factories, the farms, all carefully staged for them like a perfectly scripted Disney ride. They saw a lot of Russia
but only the Russia that Stalin wanted them to see. - Russia put on a good show for these Americans to impress them. They built a modern Potemkin village, a fake Russia to show the travelers. They showed them only the good parts. They sat them down with pretty girls. They made sure they had a good time, and they hid the bad parts, the Soviet government and
the Soviet trade unions, from these visitors. - Of course, what they're
never shown are the gulags and the execution chambers
and the torture chambers and all these things, and only educated Western intellectuals could be stupid enough to believe the kind of Kabuki theater that
they were being presented, either by Stalin's Russia or anyone else. - They were thinking about
work and labor productivity and the American worker and
the Soviet worker, but Stalin, he was talking past them. He was really grandstanding 'cause then he could say an interview
with the United States, and he needed what? Western currency. Russia was actually desperate
because the Soviet experiment was actually already failing. It needed America and it
needed American recognition. - [Narrator] And if you
impress these intellectuals and labor leaders, you'll
legitimize the Soviet Union and create diplomatic ties. By the end, the junket
left Russia ironically on a ship called Leviathan,
stuffed to the brim with hopes of spreading the dream of a reimagined, fully managed, centrally
planned United States. - There was always a kind
of fascination with Marxism and Marxism, Leninism among
American intellectual leftists, and so a certain predisposition to believe that America could learn
from Soviet Russia, that the Soviet experiment was working. - They all left with one big impression. "I can have more authority. I can have more power
'cause the Russians do. Look, they run the economy.
I could do it, too." Americans were all interested
in the Soviet experiment. I've seen the future and it works. - [Narrator] Journalists
at The "New York Times," "The New Republic," and other news sources were
breathlessly favorable. These voices of the media were
what the Americans trusted, both working class and
political elites alike. Walter Duranty, The "New York
Times" Russia correspondent, was especially helpful in
pushing a utopian narrative about the Soviet Union. - Walter Duranty, who later
emerged when you read the copy, is an apologist for
Soviet abuse, for murder, who helped to cover up the evil that was happening in the Soviet Union. - [Narrator] It turns out,
after winning a Pulitzer that much of what he reported
about the Soviet Union was, quote, "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." Those are their words, not mine. By the time the truth
of what was happening in the Soviet Union finally
began to surface in the '30s, the misinformation and propaganda had already taken root
in many people's minds. Duranty's influence was cemented as soon as he won the Pulitzer Prize. Nevermind the cover ups
over mass starvation. He had the ear of the people and of elites like
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and when FDR won the
presidency a few years later, he'd bring along two gentlemen who saw the Russian experiment firsthand. They became a part of
FDR's group of advisors, the Brain Trust, and the Brain Trust had some new ideas for how to cure The Great Depression. - [Announcer] And here it is, the beginning of the greatest
drama in American affairs, the creation of a new chief executive. Roosevelt is the nation's idol here today. Thousands of Americans are
here to cheer the birth of a new era in national
affairs, a New Deal era, which is supposed to pull
the country out of its chaos. - I am prepared under
my constitutional duty to recommend the measures
that have stricken the nation in the midst of a stricken
world may require broad executive power to wage a
war against the emergency. This nation is asking for
action and action now! (audience applauds)
(tense music) (triumphant marching music) (flames crackle)
(slow dramatic music) - [Joseph] The circumstances
under which Franklin Roosevelt enters office in 1933, the country's really in a chaotic state. The stock market crash happens in 1929. It's been going on now for several years. - [Amity] Unemployment was over 20%. We had a national emergency.
People actually were starving. - [Joseph] The Great Depression
really put so many people in America on the edge of subsistence, and so this created a situation
where people were willing to turn to whatever solutions
they thought might work. They were desperate for
government to do something. - The Great Depression and the election of Franklin Roosevelt in
1932 presented progressives with a priceless opportunity to put into practice their
optimistic hopes for the power of government to solve
social and economic problems. The Harding and Coolidge
administrations dismantled much of the machinery of government that had built up particularly
during the First World War, and Roosevelt was certain that
if he had the opportunity, he would rebuild it in a way
that it couldn't be torn down. ♪ All the world on the way to the ♪ - [Narrator] And Roosevelt pledged to strike a New Deal
for the American worker. In other words, "I know you're suffering, and I have a plan that will fix it. Trust me." The predominant view in the
Brain Trust was that the market was too unstable, too
inefficient, and wasteful. This depression could only be
tamed by expert bureaucrats. - These were people basically in the Roosevelt administration who weren't necessarily politicians. They were experts. Roosevelt really embraces
the idea of expert government that his Brain Trust is
starting to pitch to him as the future of American government. - [Steven] Franklin Roosevelt
and the other New Dealers were enormously critical of the waste and inefficiency of
free market capitalism. - Now we have an industrial economy with advanced things like
railroads and telephone. So the world's changed. So we need to direct
things from Washington. That was the mindset that
Roosevelt and his Brain Trust had. They were smarter than the rest of us. - Franklin Roosevelt had tremendous faith in experimentation as a means
of solving social problems. (contemplative music) And he says in one of his speeches, "We should try something. Just try it, and if it doesn't
work, try something else, but above all, try something." (muffled shouting) - If we would keep faith, if we would make democracy
succeed, I say we must act now! - [Narrator] Roosevelt's
government descended on the country in militaristic fashion, waging more on this economic beast and claiming all the executive
power that comes with it, creating a bunch of new agencies through a compliant Congress. - And it's really those
first couple of years of Roosevelt's presidency
where the most audacious and wide-ranging
centralized planning efforts were attempted.
- The centerpiece of the New Deal was an administration, the National Recovery Administration, that regulated business across the board, including in very confusing ways, such as how many chickens a
chicken seller could sell, what price something might be. - [Narrator] Hundreds of new laws regulating every little
detail you can think of, the precise components of macaroni, the price a tailor could
charge for sewing a button. Consumers can no longer
pick their own chickens. And the point of all of this was to bring the runaway economy
under rational expert control. - This was basically a
mandate to the president, the ability to restructure competition across the entire country. - [Narrator] And on the heels of the NRA came the Agricultural
Adjustment Act, the AAA. More regulation. The Brain Trust believed
that government expertise, not the free market,
could dictate the economy by artificially controlling prices. - The idea of scientific
management is clearly what leads to the
Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the basic notion is we need
to make sure that the farms aren't producing too much food
because once that happens, the prices of all of the
commodities will go down, and that will put the
farmers out of business. - [Narrator] The AAA
turned over any surplus of food to the government. So now with millions of starving Americans and a government that owns
a surplus of commodities that could solve that
problem, what did they do? They destroyed it. Dairies
dumped milk into the sewers. Train loads of oranges
were soaked in kerosene. Businesses shuttered, and
people continued to starve because Roosevelt's inner circle of experts knew what was best. - [Joseph] We need to plan
agricultural production so that the farmers produce less food so that their prices can say high so that they can stay in business. - Suddenly, businesses were saying, "This New Deal does not work out for us. There are too many rules. They're meant to help my business, but actually, they hurt my business and keep recovery far away from me." (soft ethereal music) - And the New Deal really is
the full emergence of this idea of centralized planning
by administrative experts, and I think the American people were ready to take that direction from the government because they were afraid
for what was happening in terms of their own families
and their own futures. All of Roosevelt's policies
really didn't do much to end The Great Depression. The Depression continued for many years. - That is why I am asking the
worker of America to go along with us in a spirit of
understanding and of helpfulness. - [Narrator] Despite the
Trust's best thinking, planning, and experimenting, the Depression was refusing to disappear. The New Deal tested the
limits of executive authority, and the Brain Trust proved
that any government, given the right crisis, can
transform a country completely, sometimes for good and
sometimes for the worst. (triumphant music) It was 1934. One in five
American workers were unemployed. The experts who staffed
President Roosevelt's new National Recovery
Administration believed they could end The Great Depression by writing strict new
regulations for the market. - Franklin Roosevelt and the
other New Dealers believed that they could solve the
problems of those industries and therefore solve the problems
of American economic life through the application of technical and scientific expertise
within the government. - Nobody knew what the New Deal would be, but what it did prove pretty fast to be was a threat to small business, particularly the National
Recovery Administration, which had a lot of codes that made it hard for business to operate. - [Narrator] But Americans quickly soured on the National Recovery
Administration's overbearing and ineffective bureaucracy. - And the way it all came to a head was through a chicken business, chicken butchers in Brooklyn
called the Schechters. - [Narrator] The Schechter
brothers were Jewish immigrants who ran a kosher chicken business. Unlike the economists at the National Recovery Administration, the Schechters were
uneducated working class men, but they knew the poultry business. Their last name Schechter was an occupational surname derived from the Hebrew word for slaughter. - So these Schechters,
it was in their culture for their customers, restaurants, or sometimes individuals,
to pick their chickens. You wanted to be able to pick
which chicken you were buying 'cause you wanted a healthy,
not a tubercular, chicken. It was the culture of the
marketplace that they came from. They were religious Jews.
They sold kosher chickens. It was very important for their customers to have chicken choice. - [Narrator] But according to the National Recovery Administration, customers weren't supposed
to choose their own chickens. NRA inspectors wrote up the Schechters on 60 code violations,
including some criminal charges. In addition, the Schechters
allegedly violated NRA codes that set worker hours
pay, and chicken prices. - New Deal comes along and
says, "You're breaking the law. We're gonna charge you.
You might go to jail." (slow dramatic music) They find themselves on the
stand, count after count against them, being
prosecuted by the government for violating New Deal law. And in the arguments by the attorneys, what you can feel is the
arrogance of the expertise. The lawyers who were prosecuting
the little chicken dealers really explicitly berated them. They said, "How dare
you presume to tell me what a chicken's price must be? Only experts can say that. If you had studied agricultural economics, you would be an expert, but
you're not an economist. You're just a little chicken dealer." So you see that clash
so clearly in this case, the expert book learning versus
the expert, the common man. - [Narrator] The case of Schechter Poultry
Corporation v. United States went all the way to the Supreme Court. On May 27th, 1935, the Supreme Court handed
down its decision, a unanimous victory for
the Schechter brothers. - Sometimes it's referred
to as Black Monday, the day that the Supreme
Court said that the New Deal and major components of
it were unconstitutional. - [Narrator] The National
Recovery Administration was dead. It should have proved to
the Roosevelt administration that their experts couldn't
regulate the economy back to health, but FDR didn't
give up on managerialism, and eventually, the Supreme
Court upheld many other programs of the New Deal, programs
that may have actually extended The Great Depression. - Louis Brandeis, one of the
people who brought the ideas of scientific management
into the public square, was now on the Supreme Court, and he was part of that Supreme Court that handed down these decisions saying that the New Deal was unconstitutional. - [Narrator] Years earlier,
Brandeis helped make the father of managerialism,
Frederick Winslow Taylor, a household name. Brandeis was the one
who told Taylor in 1909 to call his system scientific
management, but now, Brandeis was saying that
FDR had crossed a line. - It's a peculiar historical fact, right? That people credit FDR
with rescuing Americans from The Great Depression. Anyone who knows any
history at all knows that we were still in a deeply depressed
state in the late 1930s. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear that he didn't save Americans
from The Great Depression. He extended the length of the Depression. - [Narrator] Meanwhile, what happened to the Schechter brothers? The government's persecution
cost them everything. The Schechters spent every
nickel they had on their case. Their poultry business,
which was doing $20,000 of business every week
before the New Deal, went down to $2,000 a week
and then went out of business. On the year anniversary of the Schechter Supreme Court victory, The "New York Times" reported that the entire Schechter
family was virtually penniless. The Schechter case was a momentary
defeat for managerialism, but there were still plenty of experts in the government that were certain they could regulate their way
to a more perfect America. - What is an expert? Is it someone with practical
experience in a certain field, or is it someone with book learning? The man with experience,
the regular person, was insufficiently
respected by the New Deal, and we can experiment with
people because we're clever. We're professors and they
need us. There's an emergency. The patient is dying on the
table, the U.S. economy. Let's operate on his heart
because we are surgeons who know better than everyone else. - [Narrator] After World War II, a new president would
launch his own expansion of expert rule which he
called the Fair Deal. Expert economic planning
had taken a major hit in the Schechter case, but what about expert housing planning? (soft ethereal music)
(audience cheers) The purview of expert
administration grew bit by bit. It all started with Woodrow Wilson's
supposedly modest effort to offload the minute details
of government administration, from Congress to disinterested
and efficient experts until FDR's New Deal. Now a public that had
endured a Great Depression and a Second World War
was growing accustomed to centralized federal power. Six years of war dramatically
transformed the U.S. economy and many of its cities. This brought waves of
migration into cities, and that unsurprisingly brought
its own housing challenges. So how does the federal government solve a problem like housing? Simple, by throwing money
and expertise at it. President Truman took
a page from FDR's book and unveiled a Fair Deal agenda, which included the Housing Act of 1949. The FHA poured money into urban renewal and slum clearance projects. The government's experts
believed that slums could be replaced with highly efficient, self-sustaining public housing. - The beginning of the Great
Society was urban renewal, building tall towers to house people on the principle We knew
how to house people. - [Narrator] Perhaps no
project was more ambitious than St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe Complex. A massive stretch of
downtown was completely razed to make room for it, entire
neighborhoods erased. Up and coming architect Minoru Yamasaki was selected to design the buildings. Yamasaki was highly influenced by a French architect named Corbusier. Corbusier was a huge fan of
Frederick Winslow Taylor, and Taylor's principles of
efficiency imbued his work. Yamasaki wanted to try something
similar for Pruitt-Igoe. Architecture magazines raved
about his initial designs. Skip stop elevators stopped
on every third floor. The idea was both to
maximize the number of units and to foster a sense of community by encouraging interaction
between neighbors, and although he preferred
a mix of building sizes rather than strictly high rises, St. Louis officials said no. - [Amity] He had to work for government, and government said, "Well,
this is too expensive. You have to make this housing more dense." - [Narrator] Reluctantly,
Yamasaki did it their way, and up the towers went. - 33 Towers, 11 stories each, and the premise was people live in slums. Let's move them into something nice, an animal farm in the city, right? Pruitt-Igoe. These towers are clean. They have all sorts of amenities that the homes these
people live in don't have. They're gonna be happier,
and progress will ensue. - So we'll take these people,
raze all these private homes, create the modern towers. Just the fact that they're
in this modern gleaming place is going to engender
feelings in the residents (lawnmower hums) that are gonna lead to utopia. Well, what happens is the exact opposite. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] It's hard
to find the right word for what happened next, tragedy, disaster. St. Louis officials assumed
the city's population would keep growing. It did not. The same FHA money that
allowed for the construction of the complex also subsidized
suburban home ownership. Whites left the city in droves, making the complex de facto segregated. (film reel clicks)
(tense music) There weren't enough people
willing to live in the towers, which again were designed
to have maximum occupancy so that the collected
rent would cover upkeep. Many of the residents
received government benefits, so they paid a much lower rate. Under Missouri law, welfare benefits came
with a brutal requirement. A family could only have
one parent, a mother. The government was paying mothers to kick fathers out of their homes, disproportionately
wrecking black families. Upkeep quickly unraveled as there wasn't enough money
generated to pay for it. But Yamasaki's designs
bear some blame as well. - Because people couldn't get off on their floor through the elevator, they had to go on the stairs, and muggers came and mugged them there. No one wants to go up and down stairs 'cause that's where the muggers go. It was true, and Pruitt-Igoe
became very dangerous. - [Narrator] Light
fixtures in the breezeways were constantly being smashed, leaving nightmarishly dark holes where the worst of things
could and did happen. - This glorious national symbol
of a public housing project, instead of becoming heaven, became hell and was eventually dynamited in a very sad and dramatic session. So instead of building
the future American home, we put people in prisons. That's what Pruitt-Igoe was. It was universally hated
by a proud city, St. Louis. It's still a scar on the cityscape. - The people had no voice on it. Science as interpreted by the politicians in the 20th century took
on an arrogant edge to it, and, of course, that meant
the rule of the experts, the rule of the scientists. (slow dramatic music) We don't know enough. We know a lot, but we don't know enough. - [Narrator] Nobody took the failure more to heart than the architect Yamasaki. He expressed regret for
his deplorable mistakes with Pruitt-Igoe. By the 1950s, he was
giving bitter speeches about the tragedy of housing thousands in exactly lookalike cells, which certainly does not foster our ideals of human dignity and individualism. To the Detroit Free Press,
he put it more simply. "Social ills can't be
cured by nice buildings." The final towers were demolished
on spectacular display in 1976. With them should have gone the hubris of centrally planned government, but alas. What did government do instead? We launched the Great
Society, the next New Deal. Early progressives were
interested in efficiency, in making government more efficient through expert administration. They hated wastefulness. Their solution was to run
society like an engineer. To them, political science
could replace politics. The New Deal was just
applying that principle. Centralize as much power over the economy, over housing, over business as possible. The Supreme Court may have
reined FDR's program in, but the administrative state
he helped construct continued to grow in size and scope anyhow. When Lyndon Johnson announces
his Great Society initiative, the goal of this administrative
state is no longer just about expert control over the economy. It's far deeper. - So Lyndon Johnson's Great
Society was an attempt on the one hand to harness New Deal, progressive-style government,
faith in expertise, the attempt to ameliorate the problems of modern capitalist
industrialist society. We're not just going to throw
money at the poor and say, "Okay, we've provided a safety net. We're going to end poverty." And you think about how
radical that really is. We're gonna transform the human condition. - And this administration today here and now declares unconditional
war on poverty in America. - Poverty has been with human beings since human beings began to
exist, and we're gonna fix that. We, in our time in 1960s America, have the wealth and the
resources and the expertise to transform the human condition, to permanently end the problem of poverty. We have the ability in this time, not just to solve man's material needs, but also to solve man's cultural
and spiritual longings. We are going to fulfill
the longings of the soul through expert government programs. We're going to bring the
city of God down to earth. - [Narrator] Utopia was within reach. All that was required was
enough managerial power in the hands of the right people. - So we get food stamps
as a new entitlement. We get the expansion of Social Security to include Medicare and Medicaid. We get increased housing assistance. - [Narrator] Urban renewal
efforts like Pruitt-Igoe were a flat-out disaster that left cities in worse shape than they'd seen before. Even the more successful
programs fell wildly short of Johnson's goals. Shortly after health
entitlements were introduced, it became clear that there
were crucial gaps in coverage. High prices to taxpayers and losses through bureaucratic
inefficiency and fraud quickly bred increased
government dependence with an ever increasing
burden on taxpayers, which caused backlash by
a disillusioned public, but the damage was done. - By the latter half of the 20th century, all the intellectual foundations
for, and the framework of, the justification for
the administrative state had been put in place, and
it had, for better or worse, been widely accepted by the general public and by the political class. - [Narrator] But that was
not the original pitch for the American republic. At least FDR pressured
a compliant Congress into signing legislation
for his ambitious programs. With the Great Society
and greater expansion of government power over our lives, this whole three branches
of government thing was getting tossed right out the door. - Republics are based on the idea that we elect people who make the laws, but most of the laws today
aren't made by Congress. Most of the laws today are made
by administrative agencies. (muffled speaking) The rules and regulations that are made by the national government
are made in EPA, at FDA, at the FTC, at the SEC, and all of the alphabet
soup agencies that we know are the real governing
institutions in America today. (soft ethereal music)
(camera shutter clicks) - [Narrator] Woodrow Wilson
opened a fourth branch of government, expert
administrators who would deal with all the little details of regulation that Congress neither had the time nor the expertise to handle themselves. But this fourth branch was
overtaking the other three. - It now exercises all three
powers of the other branches, which is a big no no under the
idea of separation of powers, which is a key component of
our constitutional system. - The promises that Lyndon Johnson made about what government could
do for them were unbelievable and, in the end, unattainable
and have fueled the perception that government makes promises
that it can't keep that, that we should be cynical about government because government is a disaster, government can't do the things
that it's supposed to do. It makes promises and doesn't keep them. - [Martin] What happened
in the 21st century is a sudden realization by the public that they were in somewhat
of a parallel position to the worker in the factory floor. Don't think, right?
Because the experts know. - [Narrator] The experts
know more than you do about what's good for
your personal nutrition. They know better than you do
about how to keep us all safe. They know better than
you about your finances. They know how to protect the environment. They know how to protect your health. - [Don] What the COVID episode
showed is that a free people can indeed be made so scared
that they are willing, in fact eager, to give up their freedoms. - The COVID pandemic really
highlighted the ability of scientific experts
to abuse their powers. - [Martin] The government
thought it knew more than it did and then demonstrated it knew
less than it thought, okay? - The idea that government in an emergency should respond rapidly
to deal with a crisis, that's always been part
of American government, but what's new is the
authority of the science and the authority of the scientists to command our allegiance. All of our decisions
were going to be based on a model produced by
experts inside the government who could predict with much more accuracy than they actually can what would happen if you just follow their orders. - When COVID came along,
Anthony Fauci first said this, and then he said the opposite, and CDC stood in the way
of developing a vaccine, and there were all these
moments where the people in charge seemed to be more
the problem than the solution. - It soon came to be taken
by the general public and by the political elite
that they were the experts, and any questioning of
that was to deny science. - We should always remember Richard Feynman's
wonderful definition of science. "Science is the belief that
the experts are wrong." Science is about
contestation, not orthodoxy. - The lesson that I draw from the effects of the administrative state
is that it's a bad deal. - America's in the midst
of a really central moment in its history where, on both sides of the political spectrum, there's an increasing distrust
of the people in power. I think we do need to
rethink the foundations of modern administration. We need to restore some
idea of an administration that is in our control. - We need experts. We need expertise. The issue is, will experts have power? Value expertise but fear expert power. - [Steven] We actually have
to have the power to say yes to this expert, no to this other expert. - If we want a true rule
of experts, in my view, it would be to decentralize
decision making as much as possible. No one is more expert in
what is good for me than me, and I have an incentive to get it right. Don Boudreaux is the
world's leading expert on Don Boudreaux. - [Narrator] For 100 years, we've been the guinea pigs
in a grand experiment. Can managers, experts, and
bureaucrats more efficiently plan and run our lives than we can? Does society flourish when a
select few determine the path for the many? The time for hypothesizing, theorizing, and moralizing is past. The data is in, and it is overwhelming. No matter how knowledgeable, the consolidation of power
in the hands of the few has harmed the governed
every time it was tried. Experts are critical to
evaluating, judging, and planning. But if losing our freedom is
the cost of trusting anything, is it really worth it? - Things have gotten bad,
people are suffering, but it's up to us. I would like us to return
our autonomy to the people. That we can do, but we
have to choose to do it. It's not easy. (dramatic music) It's not clear how you unwind
the administrative state, but it can be done, and it must be done. (tense contemplative music)
