The US Government Is Too Big to Succeed

According to Philip K Howard of The Atlantic:

America has painted itself into a corner. Unaffordable demands for social services have led to trillion-dollar deficits, but most political leaders are unwilling to propose a real solution 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.....

Change is not a remote contingency, however....

Change occurs not incrementally but in big shifts. The relative stability over the past half century is misleading. What appears to be an immutable way of governing..., is just a temporary lull between episodes of big change....

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....

Like it or not, America will change its way of governing. The growing crisis of authority will force us to start over....

The villain that keeps America stuck in a swamp is an underlying presumption about government decision-making, no less insidious because it rules from our preconceptions rather than from a palace. To get out of this mess, we must depose it, and embrace a new way of making public choices.

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Philip K Howard (1948- )

Mr Howard's views are a clear warning to the status quo. What is missing from Mr Howard's editorial is the reality of US occupation forces stationed "permanently" on foreign soils since World War II, coupled with a more or less constant state of military tensions or actual armed conflicts with communism followed by terrorism during the same period. Indeed, the US will soon have to reconcile its domestic and foreign policies with its emerging budget constraints, the outcome of which is likely to include deep cuts in both butter and guns for our nation.

Source: Howard, P K (2012, March 3), The US Government Is Too Big to Succeed, The Atlantic.

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