Bloomberg Endorses Obama

Michael Bloomberg has come out and endorsed Obama, and there are details about the endorsement here. But one line that was especially interesting, and which is not in the updated article is where Mayor Bloomberg states, "I want our president to place scientific evidence and risk management above electoral politics."

Of all the reasons to endorse a politician of any stripe, this is perhaps the worst; it explicitly subordinates democratic deliberation to technocratic engineering. The whole point of democracy is that we are engaged in a moral debate about the fate of human beings and what they wish to do; we are not building a better transmission for an automobile. This technocratic view, that we can treat society as a machine that will simply  bend to the will of "scientific" knowledge is indeed antithetical to democracy, and creates a Comtean attitude to a society that exists for the planners, rather than for the individuals that inhabit it. In the context of climate change, it is a step toward increasing interference by the state and unelected transnational bureaucrats in the affairs of what has been the private sphere, and crowds out free thinking even in science, as Bjørn Lomborg has tried to make clear.

Vote for Obama! More technocracy!