Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area--crime, education, housing, race relations--the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

Ah. Engineers. When I was in college I took electrical-engineering courses for grins. I knew the math from the math courses and wanted to find how how the stuff that I learned in junior and high school really worked. That was engineering. If I was wrong, the circuit didn't perform right.

If an aeronautical engineer makes a mistake, the plane won't get off the ground or will fall from the sky. That's because the feedback is instantaneous, or nearly so.

The feedback with social engineering takes decades and by the time the results are in, the social engineers are in even tighter, and always have reasons to explain their failures. Also they are, or are in cahoots with, embedded wannabe totalitarians in government, who find nothing wrong with a worsening human condition because will allow them undeserved power.

Sowell has a variation of this about socialism too. My favorite excuse of socialists is that socialism would work if it was tried right. The immiseration of socialist societies should give evidence against that hare-brained idea, and the more socialist, the more the misery.

Socialists are like the blind men with the elephant. The first socialist says, "I understand the economy. We created 400,000 more jobs." But they were government jobs, and so are a net drain.

The second socialist says, "I understand the economy. There is no reason to duplicate research. We need industrial policy." Which ignores the abysmal record of such institutions. Japan's refused to let Sony license the semiconductor, thinking it had no future.

The third socialist says, "I understand the economy. Medicine is inefficient. We can nationalize it to make it more efficient." No comment needed.

Socialists and social scientists are very like blind men, except that they can ruin your life. I'll tell you what. Let's let the blind men sit in the socialists' offices with nothing to do, and let the socialists sell brooms. An infinitely more honorable occupation. And I wouldn't be ashamed to introduce a broom salesman to my parents, but a socialist?