Sclerotic Governance...

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A couple of weeks ago I posted a short commentary titled Credential Friction. The post suffered due to my time restraints. That is not to say that I was attempting to write anything remotely as encompassing as the column referenced below. Think of my post as a prescient and exceedingly modest echo of Mead's piece.

Today I found this post at Maggie's Farm referencing this column, Paul Krugman Gets It Half Right, by Walter Russell Mead. In addition to the excellent pull on by Maggie's Farm I would add this one:

We need to reduce the ‘friction’ in American society: the costs of our legal, health, educational and other government services. Some of this will come through the use of exactly those abilities of the computer that Paul Krugman dreads: their ability to replace human beings for much routine office work. Making government (and private sector) bureaucratic payrolls massively smaller is what the general interest requires.

And from the comments EJM says:

Change is never easy.

But a free market receives signals about what’s working and what isn’t, and can react to those signals, in a myriad of ways.

Government systems can only adapt by political change, which involves changing the minds of millions, including those most entrenched and beholden to the status quo. This is generally a much more wrenching process, that can even tear a society apart in violence or civil war.

The central problem with the “blue model” is not higher taxes, or collective bargaining for public service unions, or lack of automation. The central problem of the “progressive” state is that it seeks and has always sought to place more and more decision making power in the hands of the central government, not free individuals in the marketplace. This makes it almost sclerotic in its inability to adapt to broad changes in economic realities.

This is the lesson being driven home now by the budget impasse in Washington, the brawl in Wisconsin, and the looming catastrophes in more than half of our once great states.

Progress in the 21st Century will come only when the “progressive” model goes the way of other variants of the statism–socialism, fascism, communism–which were tried and failed in the 20th Century. The 18th Century founders of a limited government which left all but the most essential federal powers in the hands of smaller, more nimble state and local control, or the smallest unit of all, the free citizen, had it right 230 years ago.

Too bad we have to go through trauma and possible economic collapse only to progress to where we once were.

And the Maggie's Farm pull:

Moving from “time-served” processes of certification (four year BA degrees, three years in law or divinity school) to certification based on achievement can make education dramatically cheaper. It is sheer madness that most students spend 12 years in school, and another four in college. Why exactly should all kids the same age be in the same grade? One size does not fit all; why shouldn’t high school kids go free when they can pass the equivalent of a GED? And for that matter, shouldn’t school districts encourage and reward teachers and schools that are able to graduate students faster? Among other things, this would allow some of the resources not spent on babysitting high-achieving kids to go to kids who really need the help. How “right wing” is that?

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