Commanding the Waves to Recede

At RealClearPolicy Andy Smarick proposes an approach to solving the United States’s work problems:

One of the hardest things for policymakers to do is admit there is a major domestic challenge but then concede there is not a direct government fix. Most policy leaders, understandably, think in terms of policy. They see it as their job to use policy to improve lives. So non-technical challenges — those not readily responding to a shift in this tax rate or that appropriation — can rattle or even debilitate public officials.

that I think is the equivalent of trying to command the waves to recede. Bureaucrats and politicians will inevitably prefer to do nothing than to do things that fail and built into his proposal is the fact that there is no master stroke which will solve our problems and many of the programs that will be tried will fail.

And that’s why most of my suggestions are for government to do less, also an impossibly tall order. The pressure to do something is impossibly hard to resist.

Over time government programs take on lives of their own. Not only do they make up the livelihoods of those who benefit by them but they are the livelihoods of those who administer them. Illinois’s system of toll roads are an object lesson. It was obvious 30 years ago that they had transformed from a system for paying for road maintenance to a system for generating funds to pay the pensions of retired tollway authority workers and paying current tollway authority workers (who would become the retired tollway authority workers of the future). That cozy system was upset by open road tolling. Do you know who the most outspoken opponents of open road tolling were? Tollway authority workers.

There are any number of examples of programs that have no only outlived their usefulness but that produced graver problems. Aid to Families with Dependent Children originated benignly enough as a way of supporting widows and orphans. By the time it was shut down during the Clinton Administration it was primarily subsidizing single motherhood.

Today we have government programs that have outlived their original purposes by a century or more but still keep struggling on.

We don’t just need housecleaning. We need a systematic way of evaluating the performance of programs and killing off those that aren’t working. Among the programs that aren’t working are our whole immigration system, the hundreds of job training programs, and our system of trade.

I’ll leave you with this observation from the cited piece:

For decades, scholars and observers on the left and right have noted with regret that America’s “mediating institutions” have deteriorated. These voluntary associations, like community-based groups, local philanthropies, faith-based organizations, and unions, help individuals and bind communities together in numerous ways. A big part of the reason they’ve atrophied is because larger and larger entities, from the federal government to multinational corporations, have taken away or been given the work of these smaller, local bodies. If we want vigorous local associations to return, we have to catalyze their development and enable them to add value to the lives of citizens, families, and neighborhoods.

I don’t know what it’s like outside the Chicago area but I know that here many NGOs survive on the basis of government grants, receive little oversight, and, routinely become organizations primarily devoted to political organization in order to, unsurprisingly, generate more grants.

2 comments… add one
  • Roy Lofquist Link

    “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” ~ Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

    “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.” ~ Jerry Pournelle

  • Guarneri Link

    All that you observe is true, yet I see little hope for culling our failed or outdated programs. The benefits are focused on a vocal, interested few; the costs distributed over many. Roys quotes illustrate how that goes. In fact, I’ll bet there aren’t but a handful of (federal) programs that have ever been eliminated. In fact, a fresh government program is usually proposed to fix a failed one. Reform, you know.

    Better, I think, to ward off the programs before inception. That’s tough given the two main proponents, well intentioned zealots and nakedly self interested cynics. I fear we may be entering another round of self destruction. CA, IL and NY are hell bent on self destruction, to name several states. And the government has bastardized pensions, ruined public education and is in the process of destroying medicine. And look at what we have coming down the pike: Sanders, Spartacus, Harris, and fawning over Ocasio-Cortez. I don’t see any program culling coming.

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