A PRACTICAL GOVERNMENT REQUIRES ALLOCATing responsibility for who does what. It also requires opening doors to choices that today are barred as subjective—about practical trade-offs, about people’s character, and about ultimate values of right and wrong. Simplifying the governing framework is one step to empowering people at the point of implementation. Equally important, but harder, is creating a new vocabulary and culture of governing. We need to relearn how to take responsibility.
I’ve identified four organizational choices that have been banished by correctness and are essential for public decisions that are practical and fair: (1) giving subjective authority to a responsible decision maker; (2) holding people accountable; (3) adapting law to new circumstances; and (4) asserting moral values. Empowering people to take responsibility to make these choices requires, in each case, new structures and beliefs that contravene current assumptions. I now discuss each in order.