How much wiser must some people be to entitle them to dictate how everyone else lives?

The President Is a Lot Smarter Than You Think was the book title of a 1973 collection of Doonesbury cartoons. The book cover showed a construction worker glaring at a college punk who did not appreciate the wisdom of the commander-in-chief. The cartoon was originally a jibe at diehard Richard Nixon supporters. But since then, the notion that government is smarter than it seems has become the mantra of many social scientists, editorial writers, and pundits.

Paternalism is fashionable in part because it is self-evident — at least inside the Washington, D.C., beltway — that Washingtonians are superior to the rest of the nation. But the paternalist calculus only works if one assumes that the paternalist class is composed of saints untouched by the self-interest, vanity, or vindictiveness that trademark other humans. Paternalism requires the illusion that the political-bureaucratic class has no motivation except serving humanity. In reality, the self-interest of the paternalists leads them to exaggerate their successes, hide their failures, and multiply their prerogatives.

In the same way that premodern political orders presumed that kings and aristocrats were innately superior to peasants, so today's leviathan requires assuming that bureaucrats are vastly more proficient than private citizens. But it is not sufficient to show that government policymakers have more years of education or more graduate degrees than private citizens. Instead, paternalists need to prove that government officials are almost as superior to average citizens as zookeepers are to caged animals.

Contemporary paternalists presume that citizens will benefit even when policymakers do not know what they are doing. Champions of government intervention tend to focus solely on the mental and moral defects of private citizens and markets. Philosophy professor Sarah Conly, in a 2013 New York Times op-ed headlined, "Three Cheers for the Nanny State," noted that an "enormous amount of study over the past few decades [shows] that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations." Conly declared that people suffer from "cognitive bias. A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there."