“The ideal of true freedom is . . . for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves.”
—Thomas Hill Green
My vision for a new governing philosophy ultimately rests on the dignity and responsibility of each person. Waking up each morning, each of us must have the option of fulfilling public responsibilities in our own way. We must have the joy and tension of convincing others that we are trustworthy and effective.
The magnitude of the needed overhauls is a manifestation of how intrusive legal correctness has become. The giant bureaucratic edifice must be abandoned, and replaced by simpler frameworks activated by people taking responsibility.
The spring-cleaning of legacy bureaucracies is an occasion to purge unnecessary waste and approach old problems in a more practical way. A little humility is permitted when we see that the quest for perfection didn’t work out. By acknowledging the impossibility of curing all social ills, we can bring government back towards terra firma. Government can’t mandate perfect fairness or perfect anything. A thousand rules, or even a million, can’t achieve a caring nursing home, or a safe workplace, or a successful school. These endeavors are uniquely and self-evidently dependent on the humans involved.
Complex social ills will never be cured with money and the stroke of a pen. Progress, not nirvana, is the realistic aspiration for most social programs. Regulation is aimed at avoiding error and abuse, not purging them. That doesn’t mean government shouldn’t strive for difficult public goals. But it must do so in a practical way, mindful of resource limitations, opportunity costs, conflicting public goals, and, most importantly, the absolute certainty that the program will not work out as planned.
It would be hard not to improve upon the dense legal codes that, today, squander public funds and suffocate daily freedoms. Pushing the reset button will not only transform government, but will unleash productive activity throughout society. Here are a few snapshots of how government and society should work differently.
Regulators police unsafe conduct, not correctness. Regulation will be more effective, and less disruptive, when regulators and citizens alike focus on avoiding actual harm. Creating one-stop shops will foster entrepreneurship and improve regulatory compliance. Radically simplifying codes will improve regulatory understanding. Instead of 4,000 rules dictating how to run a safe workplace, for example, the worker safety law should set goals and general principles. Instead of getting fined for trivial errors such as inadequate paperwork, the farmer or factory foreman can at least try to explain to an inspector why a situation is not hazardous. If the inspector disagrees and declares a violation, the citizen can appeal up the hierarchy, and, ultimately, to a court. Today, by contrast, the impossibility of complying with thousands of rules means the government has arbitrary authority to impose whatever penalty it wants.
Government is accountable. When civil servants are accountable, the internal culture of public offices will be energized by mutual trust and commitment. By delegating public choices to communities, and reconnecting the rungs of the hierarchy, democracy will become an active mechanism for citizen input. If officials have a track record of being unreasonable, they can be terminated. Elections will matter.
Public schools have similar freedoms as charter schools. Instead of smothering teachers and principals with mandates, metrics, and union rigidities, the new framework will fling open the legal doors and windows, and let educators take responsibility again. Teachers will be able to draw on their personalities and use spontaneity to engage the interest of students. Principals will have authority over discipline and staffing—with safeguards against unfairness provided by a parent-teacher oversight committee, not due process legal hearings. Washington will give block grants instead of micromanaging schools, and will use the power of the purse to dislodge teachers’ union intransigence—no grants until ineffective teachers can be removed.
Doctors focus on care, not metrics and paperwork. To liberate doctors and nurses to focus on patient care, the legal and reimbursement landscape should be cleared out. Codes should become simplified so that important protocols, such as pre-surgery checklists, receive more emphasis. Reimbursement paperwork should be minimized by moving to integrated care providers such as Kaiser or other “capitated” reimbursement systems. Today doctors waste up to half their time on paperwork, much of it to justify the reimbursement for more care. Special health courts should be created to restore reliability to medical justice and avoid the waste of $45–$200 billion in unnecessary “defensive medicine.”
The workplace isn’t a legal minefield. It’s hard to develop camaraderie and trust when any criticism or spontaneity can spring a trapdoor into a vat of legal tar. It seems odd that, in the land of the First Amendment, most employers have a policy to not give job references for former employees, no matter how good or how bad. In a society where people are supposed to be free, supervisors and workers should not generally worry about law in daily work interactions except for two workplace taboos: systematic discrimination and sexual harassment. Accountability is key to a healthy workplace culture, not an act that should be laden with legal danger.
Children are allowed to run around. Children in other countries actually wander outside, play games where someone loses, and spend hours with other children without adult supervision. What this does, according to child development experts, is teach them to be resourceful in taking risks, dealing with others, and generally taking care of themselves. We must remove the bubble wrap, and allow children to be children again. This requires one cultural change—parents should no longer hover—and one legal change—judges must not allow lawsuits for accidents that occur in normal play.
Social work and volunteer help is encouraged, not constrained. Helping people is more important than regulating how the help is given. Government should safeguard against crazy schemes and people, not go ballistic over inadequate paperwork, or home-cooked meals, or if a volunteer in a faith-based group uses the G-word.
Citizens in a free society should be free to judge other people, including about their moral character. A culture where people are valued for their character and commitment is hard to maintain if we can’t act on our judgments about people who don’t uphold those values. People judging people is the currency of a moral society as well as of a healthy workplace.
Federal government is no longer a separate, inbred culture. The inbred culture of Washington, with permanent castes of current and former officials, lobbyists, and companies feeding at the trough, will be disrupted and exposed to the fresh breezes of the goals and values of the rest of the country. Agencies will no longer huddle together in an unaccountable fortress in Washington but will be dispersed around the country and repopulated by people willing to take responsibility. Civil service will no longer be a lifetime sentence but will be open to idealistic graduates willing to do public service for a few years. Congress will not be an unaccountable black box but will be reorganized into committees subject to the scrutiny of citizens for how their laws actually work.
Eliminating the waste of legacy bureaucracies releases vast public resources for current needs. Clunky government programs, built decades ago with rigid structures that preclude practical choices, squander public resources as well as frustrate Americans. Simplifying programs to be goals-oriented will not only improve their performance but will make available public resources to promote fiscal responsibility and address new needs.
The basic shift here is away from dense codes towards an open framework that allows officials and citizens freedom to meet their obligations in their own way. This shift in governing approach is dramatic, but it should not be frightening. There are no more master dictates emanating from Washington. Instead of being dictated by rules, each public choice must ultimately rest on responsible humans. For most decisions that affect you, government will be represented by a real person, right in front of you, whose job it is to make sense of decisions for the common good.
Tocqueville in his book The Old Regime and the Revolution found that one of the main causes of the French Revolution was stifling control by central government of the smallest details of life in the countryside. The traditional feudal hierarchy of local nobles had atrophied, with nobility fleeing to Paris to be near the center of power in the court. Here are some of Tocqueville’s descriptions of how citizens in the countryside and provincial cities received dictates from a distant power:
This habit of surveillance became almost an obsession with the central government. Towards the close of the eighteenth century it was impossible to arrange for poor-relief work in the humblest village of a province hundreds of miles from the capital without the Controller-General’s insisting on having his say about the exact sum to be expended, the site of the workhouse, and the way it was to be managed. . . . A most elaborate machinery had to be set up for coping with the flood of documents that poured in from all sides, and even so the delays of the administration were notorious. On studying the records I found that it took a year at least for a parish to get permission to repair a church steeple or the priest’s house. Oftener than not the time required was much longer: two or three years. . . . In the recriminatory tone of a letter written by a farmer . . . we sense something of the spirit of the impending revolution.
‘Why does government not appoint inspectors to tour the provinces once a year and examine the condition of the crops and explain to the cultivators how to improve them, how to rear their cattle, fatten them and sell them, and at what places they can count on the best markets? These inspectors should draw good salaries and the farmer producing the best crops in each district should be given a badge of merit.’
Does any of this sound familiar? Peter and Laura Ten Eyck at Indian Ladder Farms could readily identify with the plight of the eighteenth-century farmer in France. Dictating stupid rules at a distance will be endured only so long. Washington doesn’t seem to realize it, but it’s sitting on top of a volcano.
No one in Washington will willingly accept a recodification commission or other proposed reforms—these changes will disrupt and put at risk the cherished legal benefits for 5,000-odd interest groups. Nor will reform come with negotiation or political horse-trading. Small thinking is the common sin of Washington reformers. Real reform will come only by overwhelming public pressure. This will require a new party, new leaders, and a new vision of governing.
Although it’s hard for us to acknowledge, Washington has become our enemy. The fact that most people there mean well can’t disguise the reality of ineffective, overbearing, and wasteful programs, or the inability of the huge bureaucratic apparatus to respond to the goals of American citizens. Washington is little different in this regard than the hidebound courts of George III, Louis XVI, Czar Nicholas II, or other regimes that failed because they refused to heed the needs of their citizens. We should not try to avoid conflict with Washington but should embrace it. Every broken program is another reason to create a new governing framework. Every indignity of mindless bureaucracy is another weapon in our arsenal for humiliating those who resist a new framework of responsibility.