reform
Political conflict between individuals, interest groups and political parties is as old as politics and government. For much of the history of the United States, in fact, this conflict has been essential to social stability, serving as a means of avoiding more dangerous forms of conflict.
In the past few decades, however, the public has become increasingly impatient with partisan politics - for good reason. While politicians have been attacking each other, fighting highly emotional battles over symbolic issues of little real substance, undermining or reversing whatever progress had been achieved by the other party, they have been doing little to address a mounting list of serious long-term problems that face this nation. These problems - which include declining economic competitiveness, an educational system that is failing our youth, a mounting national debt, exploding health care costs, a trade deficit, a growing technology deficit, and global warming - remain ignored or inadequately addressed because such problems require political agreement and long-term cooperation, two things that our current system of politics cannot provide.
A New Economic Environment That this is happening now is no accident. It follows from the fact that we have just passed through one economic era (based on mass production) and entered another (driven by innovation and rapid technological change). Under mass production, companies used high volume production of standardized products to compete based on price within national economies. During this period, the public was focused primarily on material goals and advancing the nation’s standard of living while the primary role of government was to regulate the economy and settle disputes between interest groups over material resources. Within this role political conflict was not particularly harmful - in fact, it was used as a means of sorting out who should get resources. Those individuals, interest groups or political parties that pushed the hardest for their interests were rewarded with economic resources in the form of government programs, legislation and/or tax breaks.
Under the new economics, however, all this has changed. Instead of using mass production to compete nationally based on price, companies now use innovation to leapfrog their global competitors with new or essentially new products. This means government has a much different role to play. Continue reading ‘Why We Need A New Kind of Politics’
There has been much written about our political system being broken. But very little about the specifics, of what exactly has gone wrong and what are the systemic causes.
Mostly people describe how money has corrupted the process and call for election reform to fix it. Take, for example, Public Funding of Elections. While this certainly needs to be done, it also needs to be made clear that this is not enough. Otherwise, people are disappointed and become discouraged when they finally get reform and it doesn’t really solve the whole problem.
Worse still is when reform bills get passed and they don’t even achieve their intended result. Take the recent attempt by Democrats to curb the influence of lobbyists: Congress Finds Ways to Avoid Lobbyist Limits.
More unusual are articles like You Want to See Broken Politics: Just Look at the Casinos which spell out the problems with the political decision-making process itself. Here we get detailed analysis of what was wrong - 1. Last minute, haphazard decision-making . . . Unfortunately, there are just not enough articles like these that really try to define the problem. How can we expect to fix a problem if we don’t even know specifically what the problem is?
I read an article recently - Kaizen, That Continuous Improvement Strategy, Finds Its Ideal Environment - describing how high tech companies like Apple and Google are using Kaizen to rapidly and repeatedly improve their product. Kaizen “refers to a disciplined process of systematic exploration, controlled experimentation and then painstaking adoption of the new procedures. In the original formulation, kaizen was applied to manufacturing, where experimentation could determine whether a new process resulted in quality improvements or cost savings in a matter of months. It is much more difficult to apply kaizen to product design, since it can easily take years to design and market a new product.”
It made me ask, why can’t government take a problem, actually provide a solution for its customers and then actually begin a process of improving that solution?
The conventional answer, of course, is that government isn’t designed to work that way. But that is precisely what we need to do - to consider how it can be redesigned to work that way.
Obviously, this involves more than just reform - how to reduce corruption and influence so that the people have more say in public decision-making. Reform cannot make politicians accountable for actual results rather than rhetoric. Reform cannot assure us that solutions will be found - in fact, more democracy may actually be counter-productive. Many of our most flagrant failures are the direct result of voters insisting on conventional solutions that have persistently failed in the past (think “being tough on crime” or “the war on drugs”). Reform cannot assure us that once solutions are found they become permanent and automatic, or that these solutions are built upon and continuously improved.
What is needed is much more than mere reform.
The Election Process needs to be changed to provide adequate accountability for office-holders. Mechanisms need to be created so that something close to contractual accountability exists between the public and its representatives.
A separate branch of government needs to be established, charged with collecting the natural resource rents of land, oil, minerals, air and water as well as the left-over wealth of people no longer alive to use it (this will not include wealth clearly co-earned by spouses or others). This branch will be required to distribute all revenue except for a nominal amount needed to cover collection expenses.
Greater cost accountability needs to be established within government and among taxpayers. Instead of all the costs of various programs being aggregated into broad budgets and taxpayers paying their share of the total, the costs of various goods and services provided by government need to be separately priced with either a separate source of funding or a fixed ceiling on funding. To the extent they benefit specific individuals or groups, those private parties should pay the cost. To the extent that programs provide purely public goods or services, liability should be apportioned according to benefit. As much as possible, taxpayers should be given the opportunity to chose among service providers, benefit and cost options including no cost, no service options.
Skewed ideology needs to be centered. Currently it causes endless conflict which wastes precious resources and makes it impossible to reach agreement, let alone continuously improve systems and build on past performance.
Public costs and public needs are not adequately integrated into the economic system. Instead of government creating programs that ineffectively and inefficiently achieve their goals, the economic system should be used to achieve these goals.
