Last night, on the PBS NewsHour, Larry Summers made a very persuasive case for the Obama plan to rescue the credit markets by offering to partially pay for and to provide loans for private investor purchases of toxic bank assets. He said that the leverage would be sufficient to create a market for those assets because there would be competitors for purchasing them, and that would drive the price of the assets towards their “real” worth. I was convinced.

Then, Paul Krugman came on the program and said that this was no solution because the problem wasn’t the lack of a market but the fact that the assets weren’t “really” worth all that much, their prices having been much inflated by the housing bubble. The only thing to be done is to take over the banks and thereby eliminate the bad stuff on their balance sheets. The Obama plan was just window dressing and didn’t deal with the basic problem. I was convinced.

I am like George W. Bush. I listen to the last person in the room—Chaney always arranged to be that person—because I don’t know enough about banking to make an independent judgment. It isn’t that I can’t follow the reasoning; I just don’t know enough about the ins and outs of the discipline to ask the right questions.

I find it such a relief, such a cause for elation, to again have the government in the hands of people who know so much more about what is going on than I do that I am again in the position of a tennis fan who moves his neck back and forth to follow the volley but can’t really say much about the quality of the tennis stroke of either of the competitors. The frightening thought about the Bush Administration was that for the first time in my life I thought I knew more about public policy in a number of areas than did the people in charge of it, and much more than did the man who was presumably the “Decider”.

It isn’t that I wasn’t capable of disagreeing with the people in charge. I thought that Clinton had been wrong to sign the Welfare Reform Act. He had done so, I thought, because it was politically expedient rather than because it was a good policy initiative, and I thought I knew enough about the dynamics of poverty to form my own judgment on the matter. I even concluded, with some temerity, that the escalation of the war in Vietnam was a mistake because everything I knew about foreign policy told me it was, as did a number of experts in the field.

So the role of the citizen, much less the academic expert, is limited. You are entitled to have an opinion about anything that comes to public attention, but your opinion is worth considering only if you know something about the matter more than, to invoke a standard, what is offered to you by weekly or daily journalism. Parroting Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddox is not enough to qualify for participation in the public debate even if it does qualify you to act as the autocrat of the breakfast table. The citizen of a democracy is self constrained, deferring to authorities rather than constrained by authority.

Alexis De Tocqueville thought that most citizens were equipped to do that because town meeting democracy allowed them to trade off a road in one direction for a road in a slightly different direction, and that provided practice in both planning and politics. I think it takes some extensive knowledge to do what De Tocqueville thought was acquired by trial and error. How much is not clear. There are people who have had good college educations who have no feel for public policy, even if they did get through their required distribution courses. They just have the sentiments usual in their social circles. However admirable those are, they are not enough to allow what seems to me to be a moral though not a legal obligation of citizenship, which is to know what you are talking about, even though being a citizen means, as I say, that only you are the judge of what you have to know to hold an opinion.

I know that having a decent respect for knowledge creates an asymmetry. Those who know least will feel freest to speak because they will be least aware of what needs to be known in order to know something. But so it ever is and was, mob rule the expedient of the uninformed. It is up to the more knowledgeable to speak more carefully, to pick and choose when to speak depending on a self-assessment of what is known so as to harbor their reputation and truly deserve the name of opinion-makers.

This is hardly an outrageous or unrealistic policy. Just this past week, the blowhards in the House of Representatives, including people whom I admire, like Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel, were ranting for clawing back the bonuses paid to AIG executives. Not that I worry about those people who are down to their last twenty or thirty million dollars. It is just unseemly to take out the pitchforks and it isn’t worth getting all bothered about given the fact that the bonuses were, first of all, retention rather than performance bonuses, and that the excise tax on the bonuses passed by the House was unconstitutional for any number of reasons, among them that it was a confiscatory tax, a matter which is usually difficult to prove but not in this instance because the House proponents of the bill said that such was the purpose of the tax.

The matter has largely blown over. The Senate would never pass it; the President has registered his objections; the Democrats scored some points by getting some Republicans to vote in favor of a tax; there is no longer any need to rant and rave over this because public attention has moved on, in just a few days, to the toxic asset problem. The political process worked it out. Blowhardism was washed out by sounder judgments. That is what is supposed to happen, though it took Katrina to shake America’s confidence in Bush blowhardism. The specter of that five year period will cast a spell, I hope, for a long time and help to prevent the election of a President whose opinions are never disciplined by thought.

One should remember that Thomas Jefferson wanted public education not so much for the purpose of educating the citizenry as for educating the people who would become elected officials in a democratic republic. They were the ones who needed it so that they would constrain themselves rather than need the mob to constrain them or, even worse, lead the mob that would become unconstrained. And that remains the case.