Coyote Blog

Jay P. Greene's suggestions for potential petty little dictators in government:

• Think about how others have plans for their own lives just as you have a plan for yours.  Just because you don’t understand their plan doesn’t mean that theirs is not legitimate or that you should impose your vision on them.
• Recognize that just as others are subject to limited information and systematic deviations from rationality, so are you.  You shouldn’t imagine that you are the rational, well-informed one whose plan can fix the defects from which others suffer.
• Remember that you and your friends are not the government.  Once the government takes responsibility for an issue, no one can completely control what the government will do and those with the strongest vested interests (and often not the best intentions) are likely to have more influence than you.
• Be humble about the limits of your knowledge and expertise.  You may have gone to an elite school and have always been told how smart you are, but that doesn’t mean that you understand everything.  Understanding comes from real experience and/or rigorous examination of an issue.  Reading a bunch of articles or having spent a few years as the deputy assistant director of whatever does not count as experience or rigorous examination.

This is just a sample.  There is more at the link