The “More What, Less How” Government

First Principles: The Role of Government

What is government for? Over the last two years, this has been the dominant question of American politics. Yet so few leaders have offered coherent answers.

The Tea Party energized the right during the midterm elections but offered little more than a reprise of unworkable ideas and worn rhetoric about “limited government.” The left, meanwhile, has been in a defensive crouch, reluctant either to embrace Great Society methods of governing or to acknowledge their shortcomings. President Barack Obama last spring offered up a spirited defense of government in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan. But defending government is not enough. There is a higher threshold, for the President and all of us: to articulate, during this time of flux, an affirmative progressive theory of government.

What should we expect government to do? How should government be doing it? And when we say “government,” just whom do we mean?

The current dissatisfaction with government is not a mere perception or marketing problem, as too many on the left still believe. It is a product problem. Government has for too many people become unresponsive, dehumanizing, and inefficient. Only when we improve government itself will our satisfaction with it improve. Unfortunately, the American discourse on government has long been frozen in two dimensions: more vs. less, big vs. small. We argue for an orthogonal approach: more government when it comes to setting great goals and investing to achieve them; less government when it comes to how we collectively meet those goals. We believe this has to be a progressive project. Because progressives remain the only group in America willing to advocate for government, we have a special responsibility to imagine its role anew.

The Mushy Amalgam

This philosophy, if we can call it that, fails on three levels: theoretical, empirical, and political. On the level of theory, limited-government conservatives misapprehend both the meaning and value of freedom, and the essential role of government in democratic capitalist societies. Conservatives thunder about totalitarianism and socialism, but well short of those extremes is a broad sweet spot where government actually enhances freedom and promotes wealth creation. Empirically, there is not a single example to be found of a nation that practices “limited government” and is wealthy, secure, and stable. Not one. And for all their preaching about the size of government, conservatives have never been able to practice what they preach and shrink the state when they’ve been in power.

Ah, but the left doesn’t fare much better. We have from progressives an approach to government that for decades has been on autopilot. Obama has put forth some positive reforms that seek to reimagine progressive governance, from Race to the Top in education to health-care innovation incubators to stimulus funding that encourages clean-energy projects. But he has not made such initiatives the signature of his governing philosophy. More to the point, he has yet to spell out a governing philosophy, a big story of what government is for. For all the self-doubt and hand-wringing among progressives today, the reality is that we still live in a nation where the New Deal/Great Society template is dominant. Far too many of us, even in this season of discontent, accept a substantial state role in every sector of the economy, in which big government is meant to counter big business. We all expect government to provide a cushion against all manner of risk and misfortune, and to right all manner of social wrongs.

The result is a mushy amalgam that suits both parties. Democrats get to overpromise what government can do for people, while the GOP gets to underdeliver. Voters enjoy getting benefits from the state but also like hearing that they shouldn’t have to pay so much for it. It’s a nice arrangement for everyone but future Americans. This unspoken bargain leaves us with a national government that is ever more detached and sclerotic; that crowds out citizen action; and that is understood by the public to be the responsibility ultimately of just one party.

Sclerosis In a society as dynamic as ours, problems come too fast, and institutions are too slow. Bigness–whether at General Motors or the Postal Service–is not tolerated anymore. And people pay the price for bigness. Consider that the state of California annually spends almost $250,000 on each youth in its juvenile-justice system–and gets an 80 percent recidivism rate. If this happened one time, with one year’s cohort of kids, it would be an abysmally poor use of resources; that it happens year after year, without change or improvement, is criminal. More specifically, it is criminal that government remains so siloed, non-strategic, non-adaptive, and blind to outcomes. Once upon a time, someone built, on an industrial model and metaphor, a machine for solving the problem of juvenile delinquency. And then humans stopped running or adjusting the machine. The story plays out in our public schools, our mental-health system, our child-welfare system. Liberals should be outraged by this sclerosis, because it literally and routinely kills the weak.

Crowding Out Citizens Another negative consequence of the big-government bargain is that we’ve stopped noticing all the ways that state action crowds out community and citizen ownership of problems and solutions. When Americans come to think of government as a vending machine–drop in the coins and expect a great society to come out–then good citizenship shrivels. Citizens start to think their role is to pay, consume, and kick the machine when they’re unsatisfied. Government, as it has developed, too often drains first the incentive and then the capacity of groups of people to address problems on a human scale. Economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom has written powerfully about groups of citizens, all around the world, who have created nongovernmental networks to allocate resources, police a commons, punish free riders, and sustain high norms of mutual obligation and strong reciprocity. One needn’t be Newt Gingrich to ask why progressives can’t foster more such nongovernmental networks. Progressives say “it takes a village,” but then too often rely on an agency. We acknowledge that some problems–like the interstate behavior of rapacious health-insurance firms–happen on a scale that requires action of equal reach. We insist, however, that many more problems happen on a scale that we citizens can and should own and address.

Complaints Department One of the worst parts of the codependent left-right approach to government is that it is progressives who are blamed for this state of affairs, not conservatives. When one side is expected to do little more than rail against government, its failures at actual governance are not punished. The other side ends up bearing the full responsibility for making government work, and the full blame when it doesn’t. For all their flaws, the Democrats remain the only grown-up party in America, so it’s up to them to make government more responsive, adaptive, and effective–in practice, and not only in promises.

What Government Should Do

To do that, progressives need to update how they see the world. Market fundamentalists would have us believe that our success comes in spite of government. There is literally no evidence for this. If less were always better, then the least regulated economies would be the most successful economies. The opposite holds. It is, in fact, the rules, regulations, standards, and accountability that government provides that fuel and lubricate markets. A robust state is not mutually exclusive with a free market; it is required for it. This is why there is no robust private sector on earth that isn’t accompanied by an equally robust public sector.

Societies can be successful only with the civic cooperation, strategic organization, and economic moderation that activist government provides. And the larger and more complex a society becomes, the more government must do to provide the basis for continued success. True prosperity is always a consequence of generalized prosperity, and only progressive activist government can achieve that. The law of the jungle–market fundamentalism–brings just one possible outcome: a jungle.

Government is what turns the jungle into a garden. To govern poorly is to “let nature take its course,” which results in wild growth by a few noxious weeds and the eventual collapse of the garden. To govern well is to tend the garden: to weed, to seed, and to feed. We believe firmly that a market is the best tool ever invented to generate solutions to human problems. But since there is no such thing as a market without a government, the only question is how well, to what ends, and with what skill the government shapes and adjusts the life of the market–how well it tends–so that it yields solutions for the common good.

Let’s explore in greater depth, then, the proper role of government.

Our bumper sticker is that government should do more what, less how: a stronger hand in setting great national goals and purposes; a lighter touch in how we reach those goals. Government should be less a service provider and more a tool creator; less wielder of stick than of carrot; less the parent than the coach; less the vending machine than the toolkit for civic action. A more what/less how government should set the bar high and invest fully in a great springboard–then let people, through dedication and practice, compete to get over the bar.

Here are the elements of a big what:

To set goals for the community, whether it’s a nation or a state or a city, and to do so with prejudice–that is, with an implicit moral opinion that some outcomes are preferable to others. Clean energy is better than dirty. Going to college is better than not. Real food is better than junk food. Generating credit for productive economic activity is better than casino capitalism. And so on. When a market is left to itself, what ensues is a race to the bottom. The government’s job is to set in motion races to the top.

To equip every citizen with the greatest possible capacity–and equal opportunity–to join in the pursuit of those goals. This begins with common defense and police and courts and so forth. It means spending some of the common wealth–generated by taxes–to improve education and health and to ensure that the disparities between the wealthiest and the poorest never grow so wide that it undermines social mobility. It also means investing heavily where it’s strategic and where national scale is essential, whether that’s physical or technological infrastructure, and where only the government can build a wealth-generating commons that market participants alone would never venture to build.

To generate trust and to encourage cooperation. In a capitalist society, competition is not actually the prime imperative–cooperation is. Trust is the most precious form of capital, generating prosperity and security. That is especially so in a society like ours, so prone to fragmentation along so many lines. One of government’s core purposes is thus the active promotion of trust–not just a personal ethic of honesty but a collective condition of reciprocity built through shared experiences. This is why national service matters, and why it should be mandatory: It enables people who wouldn’t otherwise cross paths, let alone work together, to do so. It’s why any government-funded project should require robust collaboration as a condition of funding. It’s why, at a local level, seed funding that helps neighborhood groups get started is a wise investment.

To sustain true competition and break up concentrations of wealth and power that are unearned and self-perpetuating. In a nonlinear, complex world like ours, advantage and disadvantage compound rapidly. Inequities of opportunity become self-reinforcing. This entails redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation. But let’s be very clear. Conservative leaders already redistribute wealth–toward the already wealthy. This is not consistent with any idea of America. Market fundamentalists contend that inequality is natural and inevitable. We concede that talent is not equally distributed and outcomes will never be equal. But in true capitalism there is true competition, in which unearned and inherited advantage is leveled so that talent can compete against talent. True capitalism is more competitive for being more fair and more fair for being more competitive. This is the opposite of trickle-down economics; it’s bubble-up economics. Government’s job is to foster and sustain it.

How Government Should Do It

If government is to do more what and less how, here are some of the ways to approach the how:

Radically Relocalize

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