There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them

 In the past ten years, reality has repeatedly made the same points again and again.

If you lie, flip-flop, or mislead, people stop trusting you.

If you pay people for not working, they don't work.  

If you mandate employees vaccinate or be fired, employees will leave your employment.

If you lose employees, you lose your capacity to deliver your mission. 

When you mandate lenders into making bad home loans, or simply reward them for doing so, you get a mortgage crisis.

If you defund or operationally throttle the police, you get a surge in crime.

If you do not enforce routine laws, you get a surge in urban camping.

If governments spend money they don't have, you get a surge in inflation.  

If you seek to mandate equality of outcomes, you get equality of misery.  

You don't have to be an oracle to call these things but time and again, our government "experts" are surprised by the perfectly predictable outcomes.  George Orwell observed that 

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

Yet here we are with a surfeit of bad outcomes from ideas which were so bad that only "experts" could have believed them.