Saturday, July 20, 2013

'The Rule of Nobody'

Inefficient Large Government - This is article summary on Phillip K Howard's piece, as well as my own writing. Please check out his articles in the Atlantic as he is a thought leader in seeing the big picture. 

America is on an unsustainable path.  The nation is faced with multi-trillion dollar deficits, but most political leaders are unwilling to propose real solutions for fear of alienating voters who want it all. Special interests maintain a death grip on the status quo, making it hard to fix things that everyone agrees are broken . . . is there a way out?

I know this graphic is from Heritage foundation but the figures check out.

The reality that government is unsustainable in its current form is fast approaching and little is being done about it. Conservative candidates pledge smaller government, but no candidate has solutions to crippling healthcare costs.

Most Washington insiders say changing the system is hopeless. No democracy has ever been effective at clawing back promises. America can't even remove benefits that long ago outlived their usefulness like farm subsidies from the 1930s. Change is not a remote contingency, however. The next president will likely have an historic opportunity to remake the operating system of government. It's time to get ready for tough choices.

Change occurs not incrementally but in big shifts. The relative stability over the past half century is misleading. A society hums along for a few decades, as pressures build up in one area or another. Then, because of a scandal or some outside crisis, the status quo gives way to this accumulated pressure.


This pattern is revealed clearly in American history. Over the past 100 years, America has made three dramatic shifts in the role of government: The Progressive era at the turn of the last century, ending laissez-faire; the New Deal in the 1930s, instituting social safety nets; and the rights revolution of the 1960s. Each of these represented a radical expansion of the reach of government into society.

The challenge of the 21st century is to pull government back from daily choices while still allowing it to provide regulatory oversight and safety nets. 

We must discipline government's appetite for social control, and push it away from the heaping table of unaffordable mandates and bloated regulation. But the inertial forces of government don't often turn back towards self-discipline. Each form of government works well until it loses its founding values.

The problem of "collective action" or getting people together to act in the common interest is extremely difficult. Short-term selfishness prevents any significant change until it's too late. The people who inhabit our national and state capitols, not only politicians but bureaucrats and special interest lobbyists, see themselves as agents, not principals. The job is to do what their "base" wants, not do what they think is right. Interest groups continue to cling to the status quo, even though they know something has to give.

America will change its way of governing. The growing crisis of authority will force us to start over. But how?  Change in a crisis usually follows a new vision of a better society, often overthrowing either a tyrant or a discredited social norm.  Identifying the culprit requires answering this question: What is it that prevents a fundamentally sound society from making practical choices?

America is ensnared in what is called "the rule of nobody." 

After decades of legal accumulation, government is out of anyone's control. Government is run by a giant legal blob, crushing society and public employees under a mass of mandates and bureaucracy.

No human is in charge, government is like Stanford's self-driving car picture below, but definitely not as finely tuned. Who's in charge of balancing the budget? No one, the budget is largely pre-committed to programs made in political deals decades ago. Who's in charge of running the school? No one, the principal is crushed by federal and state mandates, and tied in knots by union work rules. Who's in charge of approving the power line to take energy from the wind farm to the urban areas? No one, the bureaucratic process goes on indefinitely, at the mercy of whoever cares to challenge official judgment.


Americans know that something basic is broken. The dysfunction is manifested in the daily choices of doctors, educators and officials unable to act sensibly.  The accumulation of countless skewed choices results in runaway healthcare costs, failing schools and impractical bureaucracy.

We must restore individual responsibility as the organizing principle of government. Putting people in charge again is much more radical than it sounds at first. It requires replacing the unknowable mass of bureaucracy with a simpler framework of goals and pragmatic authority. Real people would take back the responsibility to meet our public goals.

The question at hand for a functioning government is this: Is the person in charge free to make a sensible choice? If not, nothing will work sensibly.

The challenge is how to make responsibility trustworthy. What if the teacher is unfair, or the official is on the take, or the President is just helping his cronies? Personal accountability is one protection: people caught misbehaving should lose their jobs, or be sent to jail for crimes. But distrust is pervasive, and Americans will want some protection up front against bad decisions.

This can be done with human checks and balances, not thousand-page rule books or legal proceedings that drag on for years. For important decisions, give oversight authority to an independent official or group, i.e a school-based committee of parents and teachers with authority to veto a decision to dismiss a teacher. These checks should be based on human judgment. One person makes a choice, another checks it. Government can move forward.

Accountability today means mindless compliance, not doing what's right. The overall effect is profoundly immoral. By what right do we think we can make the children of tomorrow pay for trillion-dollar deficits today? If ever called out the accused will say, "The law made me do it."   
   
Putting people in charge again is hardly a ground-breaking or earth-shattering idea. Our founders designed our Republic not to avoid human judgment but to give officials freedom to use their independent judgment. Better that we embrace a new vision consistent with democratic values than the alternatives provided by history.

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