HA!
America's elite are all one big, happy family of group-think jag offs.
Take a look at the U.S. Supreme Court over the past 30 years. The vast majority of justices come from 5 Law Schools - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Stamford.
Are there really no other smart people from any other walk of life?
Take a run down the Managing Director list at Goldman Sachs (and the former Bear Stearns and Lehamn Brothers). Same universities (business school rather than law school). I have some experience in the matter - once upon a time I worked for Bear Stearns.
(By luck and happenstance I got hired, though I was nothing more than a self educated wise guy. Actually Bear liked to promote the idea that they hired guys like me, they called us PSD's (Poor, Smart with a Deep desire t be rich. The Chairman coined the term and nobody wanted to argue with him) and to their credit there were a few smart, token working class guys floating around. I don't want to sound ungrateful - I was extremely well paid, and the experience I got and the connections I made I could not have recreated elsewhere - but there was still a glass ceiling of sorts for guys like me. I was the number one producer of new clients in private client services (PCS) in the firm. Numero Uno. No one even close. I knew how to make it RAIN. But you were limited in earnings potential in PCS, the big dough was in mortgage backed securities (MBS) trading and sales, and I was an ambitious young man. When I went down to see the folks in MBS, they told me I was "Not Qualified". I said "how much more qualified can I be? I produce more new business than the other 500 guys in PCS." To which Craig S. said: "I have 20 guys with MBA's from Harvard". And there it was. I was a proven rainmaker and producer, but I never summered on the Cape, I played football and boxed instead of tennis and golf, and washed dishes at the local Country Clubs instead of being a Member... Not that I expected another outcome, after all I was taking a long shot at a job EVERY Wall Street maniac wanted. The worker bees in that department were making $3 million+ per year, and the big cheese, Warren S., $20 - $30 MILLION (he eventually got fired and had to get by with $400 million or so). Not an easy position to land. But his dismissal of my accomplishments in favor of glorified, part-time group training irked the sh*t out of me. On the way out I told Craig I couldn't think as slow as him if I tried, not if I were drugged, not if I was asleep, and I would wipe the floor with his minions in chess, cross word, concentration, any intellectual competition he could think up; I never worried about "burning bridges"... I was only too willing to walk around with a can of napalm and a blow torch... and I don't think these guys were used having someone talk to them like I did.... When my boss up in PCS heard that I was trying to catch on with MBS he was furious... but when he heard what I told Craig on the way out he laughed hysterically, and all was "sort of" forgiven. I moved on to a firm that let me run the show, but without Bear's capital the opportunity was not quite the same. A few years later it seemed to me that if I wanted to be the big cheese I would have to give the job to myself and I opened my own shop. Little did I know that the MBS group at Bear Stearns were the very guys that eventually blew up the world financial system. Funny how things work out.)
Our system, corporate, legal, political, "educational" favors an entrenched ruling class in ways innumerable to count, "but the group-think" thing going on at the U.S. Supreme Court is nothing short of APPALLING. Especially since these are APPOINTED positions.
There is also no Constitutional requirement that a Supreme Court Justice must be a lawyer. Have you ever read the U.S. Constitution? It is just not that long or complicated. Perhaps you would argue about precedent and decisions. Like what? The Dred Scot case?
But what do I know. I MUST be dumb. After all, I didn't go to Harvard.
Libertariananimal (at) gmail