And now for number 8:

No. 8: Redesign the Department of Homeland Security

The creation of DHS was not a mistake by way of concept, but it has been a huge mistake by way of design. As it now exists, DHS cannot make America safer; it can only make us more vulnerable. It is a clear and present danger to us all.

The original proposal for a Department of Homeland Security—developed before 9/11, by the way, by the Hart-Rudman Commission on whose staff I served for more than two years—recognized the need for some coordinating mechanism for domestic security comparable to the National Security Council for American national security policy in the wider world. We had our three main border security agencies—the Border Patrol, the Customs Service and the Coast Guard—in three different Executive departments (Justice, Treasury and Transportation). This made absolutely no sense. Also, the INS was an internal contradiction: half of its job was keeping certain people out of the country, and the other half of its job was letting certain people in. You don’t have to be a management professional to see how stupid this was.  

The original DHS proposal was to amalgamate these three relatively small agencies into one new Executive Department, and bring FEMA in, as well, to serve as its organizational framework. FEMA always had a small Washington footprint, with most of its assets pushed out in its ten regional centers, close to where problems and their first-responders were. The idea was to create a DHS that, like FEMA, had a small Washington presence and that pushed resources and responsibilities out to the regions. This was subsidiarity and common sense at work.

There was no good reason to make DHS more centralized than that, anymore than, on the foreign policy side, the NSC needs to swallow the Defense and State Departments and the intelligence community. There would be an EOP (Executive Office of the President) office for domestic security comparable to the NSC, and the new Executive department, DHS, could be comparable in size to, say, the Department of Education, or maybe even smaller.

That’s not what happened. There is an EOP office for homeland security, but DHS as it exists today is a bureaucratic monstrosity, a slow and ponderous behemoth that has not one hope in a million of operating within the decision cycle of terrorist adversaries who want to strike us in our homeland. It has swallowed other agencies whole, and buried them beneath multiple layers of bureaucracy. 

Even so, DHS does not control more than 25 percent of what the government spends on homeland security. It is a textbook case of how not to align strategy, resources and operational capacity. DHS is also understaffed for its size, which shows you what happens when people who don't really believe in government design a new department or agency. This has led it to depend overwhelmingly on contractors, but its staff is even too small to manage that right.  What a mess.

DHS today is not reformable anymore than it is manageable. It needs to be ripped apart, and reconfigured according to the original design. As it stands, DHS is more a liability to our security than it is an asset.

OK here's number seven, followed by an afterword -- after it, of course, or else it would be a foreword....

No. 7: Control the destructive effects of television advertising on national politics.

All professional politicians in the United States know about the invisible 800-pound gorilla over in the corner: It’s called television. The way to win statewide and national office these days is to buy more and better TV advertising than your opponents. To do that, you have to raise really huge amounts of money to buy air time and hire the professionals who make the ads. To do that, you’ve got to devote an inordinate amount of time and staff to fund-raising that would be better spent talking and listening to voters, and to thinking about and planning how to actually govern if elected.

 
Worse, having to raise all that money raises troubling questions about corruption. There are only so many places a candidate can get huge sums of money, and all those places have vested interests in the outcomes of important policy debates. Money usually buys access to politicians, not actual decisions; those who hold otherwise are more cynical than realistic. Still, the system isn’t healthy, and it’s getting worse. It’s not a good thing when industries that contribute to political campaigns get to have their staff people essentially draft legislation pertaining to their own industry. And the campaign finance reform we’ve had in recent years, almost everyone agrees, has made things worse, not better.

There is actually an easy way to alleviate, if not solve, this problem—though it is, admittedly, politically difficult to achieve. It has two interconnected parts.

The first part is to have the Federal Communications Commission auction off rather than give away all broadcasting and bandwidth resources, not just some of them as is now the case. The companies that acquire broadcasting licenses are not exactly pauperized; they can well afford to pay for this relatively scarce resource—and that’s exactly what broadcasting bandwidth is. The money earned from these auctions and license renewals could then be used to subsidize political campaigns and help educate voters, just as happens in lots of other democratic countries.

The only way this works out fairly is if the time for active campaigning is constrained—this is the second part. Almost every other Western electoral democracy does this. There is nothing anti-democratic about it. It does limit free speech in some theoretical way, but the way things work now, with money dominating the process so completely, limits free speech for lots of candidates in a very real, not just theoretical, way. So the FCC should require all of its clients to allow a certain minimum of air-time during constrained official campaign seasons for all candidates who qualify to get on the ballot.

This is not a panacea. Candidates with lots of money could still buy more advertising during the campaign period, but those without a lot of money would be guaranteed a minimum of exposure to explain their proposals and views. We shouldn’t try to sterilize the advantages of money in politics, which is impossible anyway; but we shouldn’t want money to trump absolutely everything all the time, either.

So, sell the licenses to subvent free and fair political debate, and limit campaign seasons to curtail costs. This is a much simpler solution than those trying to limit and measure political contributions, whether of “soft money” or “hard money” and so on and so forth. Most such proposals, as with McCain-Feingold, are inherently too complex to be workable, because there are a zillion lawyers eager to make billions of dollars finding millions of ways around them. Proposals for a voluntary public funding system make a certain amount of sense, but the fact that they have to be voluntary to be constitutional limits their utility.

Besides, if the core problem is television—and it is—then the best solution is a direct one aimed at putting some boundaries around television’s functions in political campaigning. You can’t affect the position of a shadow by doing things to the shadow; likewise, we can’t do much about the shadow cast by television’s power. We have to get at the source.

And now the afterword, which connects my mention of David Korten the other day with David Brooks' column today with the fact the someone in Oregon just bought my old copy of Kirkpatrick Sales' book Human Scale, published back in 1980. And connected, too, to what I wrote on February 10 about cycles and bicycles. If I look just behind me I see a row of about 20 books I bought and read in the 1970s and early 1980s about ecology as a public policy paradigm. A lot of these books, including Human Scale, were a little flaky and impractical. Most of them, actually.  But, you know, looking back, they had the big idea right. It's taken more than 30 years for the reality of it to finally ooze through the the more mainstream among us. But I think it's actually happening. Maybe. And what is so sweet about it is that the recognition of what's gone wrong does not look any more conventionally liberal than it looks conventionally conservative. That old language, as I have said, is virtually obsolete. Maybe I'll re-read some of that old 1970s stuff--before it's all been sold away on Amazon!

OK, here is number 6 from my presidential platform, in a moment. First just another newspaper note or two, which I will do from time to time when something that happens in the Administration and/or the world echoes with something recently explained in this blog. 

Today's New York Times says on the front page above the fold that as part of the "stimulus" there will be a $1.1 billion program to investigate which medical procedures actually work and which don't, or don't work so well. This echoes directly with yesterday's post about the many reasons for escalating health care costs, and also with the idea of a Federal Health Board proposed by Sen. Daschle and others. This is exactly the sort of thing an FHB would do. The question is, can such a study actually be pulled off, get useful and unarguable results? It's not easy to see how one does this without touching off all sorts of arguments and uncertainties, but I suppose we'll find out. I suppose we'll also find out if this study is a wedge meant to open a crack to create a much larger FHB, one without wise principles of exclusion. Maybe, with all the looming issues in our future concerning biotechnology and the need for triage decisions, we'll have to have a larger government role in health care. Maybe, but the tradeoffs will be ferocious.

Also in today's paper, the Washington Post in this case, Bob Samuelson writes about the similarities between Japan's 1990s' economic doldrums and our own now. He vanquishes conventional wisdom about what happened in Japan. And he agrees with my hunch, back on February 10, above, that what we're seeing is not just the downslope of a typical business cycle but something deeper in the culture. Here's what he wrote toward the end of the column: "Since the early 1980s, American economic growth has depended on a steady rise in consumer spending supported by more debt and increasingly asset prices. . . . The present U.S. slump signals the end of upbeat, consumption-led growth. But its legacy is an overbuilt and overemployed consumption sector, from car dealers to malls. The question is whether our system is adaptive enough to create new sources of growth to fill the void left by retreating shoppers."  That's pretty much what I said, in my own words with more an emphasis on the hopeful end of the throwaway, consumerist, anti-thrift economy we've had since way before the early 1980s, going back at least a quarter century before that. It's nice when you find someone smart who agrees with you.

And now, on to #6, about bioscience and its dangers (as well as promise).

No. 6: Create a new national institution to control biotechnology.

American society is the most history-oblivious, optimistic and market-oriented ever to exist on this planet. For the past century and more, we have been conducting a totally unregulated experiment in the sociology of science on ourselves. Build railroads all over the place if we can? Sure, and who cares what the social, economic and legal implications might be. The internal combustion engine and the interstate highway system? You bet: Pollution, congestion…what’s that? Allow the scale of corporate growth to far outpace any regulatory framework? Why not? Trickle, trickle, trickle down. Television? Right: What harm could that possibly do? Birth control? Yes, indeed, and don’t look back. The Internet, BlackBerries, a cell phone that can double as a toothbrush in a pinch? Um….

Americans commercialize everything our best minds (and our other minds) can invent, let the market take its natural course, and ride each great successive wave of stability-destroying innovation all the way in to the beach. Then we shake our hair dry, take a deep breath, and run back out to catch the next wave. It’s only as an afterthought that most of us ever think to ask if these changes have been worth the costs. Maybe they have been; but not to even wonder about the question as a society has always stuck me as strange. It’s like habitually jumping off the high dive without looking to see if there’s water in the pool just because you like the sensation of hurtling through the air.

Only once in American history did it occur to us to ask whether the government might not have some obligation to think through the consequences of a new technology before letting the market run wild with it. That was with nuclear energy, right after World War II. We created the Atomic Energy Commission to deal with it. Well, contemporary biotechnology is even more fraught with potential for monstrous abuse today even than nuclear energy was in 1945.

And what have we as a nation done about it? Basically, nothing--even as other countries, and the EU as well, have recognized the danger and have begin to act. All we've done is assemble groups of bioethicists to ruminate over the matter, while dangerous problems and horrific precedents have already been set. Leaving this technology to the market has resulted, among other things, in untutored judges ruling that human genes can be patented and owed by corporations. This is outrageous, an abomination to the very spirit of our humanity. We have got to overcome our so-far cavalier approach to arguably the most momentous danger of our century. We need the equivalent of the AEC for biotech, and we need it now.

Now for number 5, but first a modest musing or three about today's newspaper. 

It's amazing how sometimes you can find something interesting to ponder in the most unlikely places. Take the New York Times Magazine, for example, an often infuriating waste of ink, paper and time. The NYTMag has become the national homosexual highbrow magazine over the past dozen or so years. I am not against homosexuals, but sometimes I do get a little sick of hearing about how wonderful, and how oppressed, they are--and how so altogether wonderful single-female or in any event male-less parenting can be (when all the actual social science data we have says otherwise). I don't care what people do in private with their genitalia as long as they don't insist on telling me about it, and that goes for heterosexuals as well as homosexuals and transsexuals and metrosexuals and any other kind of -sexuals you can think of but I can't. 

I also get a little sick of the term homophobic, as if not assenting to and cherishing the "gay" lifestyle means you're somehow afraid of it. I'm not afraid of vomit, but that doesn't mean I'm particularly interested in someone else's manifestation of it. Well, I suppose that if this sort of thing is what the Magazine's readers really want, then the editors are right to give it to them. And how should I know?  I haven't done a survey. 

I like the Magazine for the puzzles, especially the acrostic, which they run every other week. They amount to brain exercise, which I need. I don't like the crosswords as much because to do them efficiently requires a lot of pop culture knowledge, to include television and Hollywood movie watching, two activities I do not do a whole lot of--which is not a boast, just a fact. 

Anyway, every once in a while the Magazine will have a great piece--I can think of four or five over the past year--not a high average, perhaps, but not entirely useless. Yet today what struck me were three items on the Letters page....of all places.  One was a letter by an economics professor from NYU, someone named Edward Wolff. He was commenting on last week's cover piece by David Leonhardt about education. He main point was that, pace Leonhardt, there is no statistical evidence that mean improvements in education pay any economic dividend. 

My reaction to this is that Wolff simply must somehow be wrong--either the statistics are misaligned with what they are supposed to measure, he is not standing far enough back to see the causal chain, or something. This just seems too counterintuitive at first blush to possibly be true. And yet, he may well be entirely right. It may be that human capital as applied to economic growth is highly skewed, that a few thousand scientific geniuses, enlightened tinkerers and entrepreneurs account for nearly all the productivity growth at  base in out society, and that what 99% of everyone else knows doesn't count for a whole helluva lot. That's not something you want to say too loud in an egalitarian-minded culture (never mind the reality of things). But it might actually be true.  It would be nice to know; damned if I'm prepared to trust one economist's opinion.

Even more interesting was a little note from a medical doctor in Vermont, Rebecca Jones. She points out that for all the medical technology we have, it can't and doesn't trump such basics as diet, exercise, sleep and emotional well-being in our overall health. She's so obviously right that I see no need to defend her further--and I will only return to this point briefly below, since #5 on my presidential platform is about health care. Amazing how three sentences from someone with experience and common sense can make hundreds of thousands of pages of technical writing about the health care crisis seem so pointless. 

Best of all, however, was mention, by someone named Rosaleen Mazur from Rhode Island, of a book called Agenda for a New Economy by someone named David Korten, who I admit I never heard of until this morning. Maybe it's a bad book--who knows? But it sounds like it bears a thesis I have carried in my head and heart for 40 years--that we ought to be developing an economy based around local communities, even as an international economy goes ahead based around Wall Street and international trade. That means supporting one-of-a-kind local businesses, locally owned, that use local labor and care about the local environment. 

This approach reminds me of the Prosperity Index that the Legatum Institute has devised, which insists that quality of life issues need to be counted is as much as stuff than can be measured with numbers. To have ever not realized that is the price we pay for our public schools having ignored philosophy and ridiculed religion all these past forty or so years, of course, but that's another story. I have to find Mr. Korten's book, and then, perhaps, Mr. Korten, and invite him into The American Interest. 

We'll see--he sounds like the subsidiary-loving type, the crunchy con-type perhaps (though he may not realize it), the anarchist-as-opposed-to-statist kind of person I have always been myself. I distrust all concentrations of power, whether private or public. I insist on metis and subsidiarity as the most effective and morally sound way to solve problems, whenever possible. I insist that there is an ecology of liberty--that people who do not develop in their everyday lives the habits of self-sufficiency cannot make up the ingredients of a genuinely free society. Ah, but more of this later. Now to health care.

No. 5: Don’t even try to create a national health care system.

I know that this is a very complex problem, one with many, many, many moving parts. I do not expect, and no one else should expect, that a short blog post can encompass it all. But I will try. 

The main reason health care costs are skyrocketing is fairly easy to understand, but almost no one who has not thought systematically about this seems actually to understand it. Here it is in a nutshell: Science and technology are rapidly expanding the range of diagnostic and treatment options, but without—as in other areas of our economy—also enabling us to substitute capital for labor to make medical functions more cost-efficient. In medicine, no matter what sorts of diagnostic and care options there are, we still need highly skilled doctors and nurses and lab techs. Machines or robots can’t substitute for people in medicine like they do in building cars or making steel or growing food. Trained human capital is very expensive, and this double-whammy—new options opened by bioscience and the need for skilled people—is what makes health care costs keep rising.

Of course, that’s not the only reason. There are at least seven others I can count; let's just list them. 

One is demography. We are an aging population (not as much so as some others, like Japan, China and the EU, but aging all the same), and older people suck up more medical care dollars than younger people. This is structural; there's nothing we can do about it, but it is only temporary, because eventually the population pyramid will change its shape.

Two is that about half of all medical spending in the United States is spent by the Federal government, and the Federal government spends inefficiently because it is too large. Its transactional costs are huge, and it has a knack for making them even hugher—the insane HIPPA “privacy” legislation being a key case in point. 

Three is that private insurance companies also have huge inefficiencies and transactional costs. And they are not entirely honest about how they go about their business.  They cherry-pick and they exclude.

Four is the near total disorganization of the capital-technical stock in medicine. Some regions have too many machines and labs and some too few. Some regions, like Rochester, New York where the Mayo clinic is, are something like 17 percent more efficient than the norm. We don't need a national health insurance infrastructure to model and scale up health care systems within the United States that have proven efficient. If we do that--learn from our successes--we can mitigate the effects of our supply-push system, defined, simply, as "we have a machine, we use it whether it makes sense or not." We have an obsession with the technology, and we ignore common sense, as Dr. Jones says: diet, exercise, sleep, emotional well-being (eg., stress). We are terrible at preventative care in this country. There are all sorts of cultural reasons why this is, including how doctors get trained these days, but we do not have time to linger on this. 

Also, note that doctors use the machines in part to protect themselves from malpractice suits--lawyers and their damned overlawyering--that's the fifth factor.  But the cost of malpractice, while significant, lamentable and avoidable with good policy, is actually not as huge as is often assumed. Probably more expensive over all are, six,  the lobbies for the pharmaceutical industry, a very powerful special interest that gets Congress to vote it all sorts of expensive favors.  Not only are we overlawyered and over-machined, we are also outrageously over-medicated.

And seven,  one other major reason for the problem is something no one wants to talk about: religion. Yes, you heard me right.

In an age of older, more innocent religious belief, mortality was accepted as a natural facet of living. Aging was seen as not only inevitable but noble; we respected our elders, and venerated them. Now most Americans run from aging and mortality like scared children. No wonder, then, that people today seize upon the possibilities of rejuvinative medicine in a way most of our forbears never would have. Upwards of 40 percent of all medical expenses in the United States is reportedly spent on very elderly, ill people in the last eighteen months of their lives! And a lot of that spending is on operations and treatments of dubious real value to anyone, except those who sell painkillers and medical machines. (Increasingly, too, disproportionate amounts of money are spend on those at the very beginning of their lives, including many damaged infants who will never be able to lead normal, productive or independent lives, but that's another matter.)

This spending we do on the aged and permanently infirm is absolutely crazy. I am not advocating euthanasia, so don't get prematurely excited. Of course I respect the non-instrumental, intrinsic  sanctity of all human life; I am a religious Jew, after all--I have no choice. But that does not mean we should use machines and scarce medical resources to keep such people alive at the expense of others, which is, in effect, what we are actually doing. Unless people write binding living wills, children and other relatives are extremely loath to “pull the plug”, and medical professionals are afraid of being sued if they do. But how dumb do we have to be not to realize that if insurance pools have to take into account that 40 percent of all costs that are spent on people who we know will never get well, and whose lives have generally lost purpose or any sense of enjoyment, premiums are going to be very expensive?

Now, policy can be important. If there is way to use policy to encourage people to eat right, get exercise, get good sleep and enjoy emotional well being, that would solve most of our health care crisis overnight. You bring core costs down, and suddenly insurance premiums become far more affordable--like duh, right? And this really is is the beginning of wisdom here: It is plain stupid to worry about insurance coverage without thinking of ways to reduce the overall cost structure of health care, but to do that you have to understand where the escalatory pressures actually come from. They come from the culture--the political culture and the culture more generally.

It follows that, by definition, there is no single technical or bureaucratic fix for our circumstances. Can you think of policies possible in our Congress that would make people eat right, exercise, sleep well, and--the most wildly improbable of all--see to their emotional well-being?!  I can think of one: Stop letting fast-food crap "restaurants" advertise their destructive so-called "food" on television, and here we come back, yet again, to one of the the roots of evil on our country, television and TV advertising, with its mean-world syndrome that increases our national stress quotient and its relentless pollution of our national capacity to distinguish "need" from "want", thus infantalizing our entire culture--because, yes, knowing "need" from "want" is what has traditionally distinguished an adult from a child.

As I say, better governance would help, certainly, if it were practically available (which it isn't)—but no, it won’t really fix the problem anyway. As with problems of equal access to decent education, health care issues amount to a series of what are essentially moral issues. Who deserves what care, or enhancement? What should a minimum level of care be, regardless of a person’s ability to pay, and who gets to determine that minimum? If the patient can’t pay, who should—and who gets to determine that? When does, or should, the concept of triage kick in for the care of the elderly and terminally ill? 

Obviously, these are controversial and fraught questions. We will probably never likely agree on them at a national level, anymore than we’ll agree on abortion and gay marriage. If we try to create a national health care system, we will be forced to answer such questions for all of America’s religious and regional communities at the same time. That is just asking for trouble.

Of course, if we do this we will also inevitably saddle ourselves with a highly bureaucratized, inflexible and expensive management apparatus, as well (again, not that the market-driven model we have now is a paragon of efficiency!). That's why ideas of creating a Federal Health Board will probably end up doing, unless they are very carefully designed with strict principles of exclusion in mind. Everyone who is honest about the problem knows that. Such an apparatus will help drive talented young people away from careers in medicine—already a worrisome trend. Thus, in order to deal with what some construe as a problem of fairness, we will make the problem of costs much worse, and the vast majority of Americans will be worse off for it. With dollars for health care relatively scarce, the last thing we should want to do is add gratuitous transactional costs to our medical system.

Given the nature of the problem—which, again, is as much moral and cultural as technical or administrative—it is also one best handled at the state level. The State of Massachusetts under Governor Mitt Romney managed to hammer out a way to do universal health care. Other states have taken note, and if it works in Massachusetts variations can work elsewhere. But circumstances differ from state to state, and sustainable solutions have to fit local conditions. To think there is a one-size-fits-all solution on a national level is delusional. It represents the “will to a system” of social engineering that every sensible philosopher and observer has warned against. The solution to intrinsically difficult problems like health care costs is not made easier when its scope is made larger. This is so obvious that, under ordinary circumstances, it should not need to be explicitly pointed out. But evidently we are not living in ordinary circumstances.

There is another reason we need now to recognize and deal with the moral and political aspects of our health care problem: It’s going to get worse. There is already a troubling blurring trend between what is medically necessary and what is merely desirable. For example, drugs originally developed for legitimate therapeutic reasons, like Viagra, are now used for essentially recreational and enhancement purposes. It is also becoming harder to distinguish some minor surgeries and physical therapies justified for physiological reasons from cosmetic surgeries. But the real looming problem before us concerns the impact of genetic engineering: hence my next idea.

And now number 4; but first, you just have to look at the photo on the front page of the Thursday Wall Street Journal. There are Sen. Reid, Sen. Spector and someone else, not sure I can remember who, and above them, flattened by the magic of photography, is a ceiling decoration in the Senate caucus room that looks exactly like a roulette wheel. Talk about perfect inadvertency.....

No. 4: Remove “red button” culture war moral issues from national politics.

The abortion issue and issues concerning marriage for homosexuals can never be settled in American national politics. These are issues that raise absolutist claims that, by their very natures, are resistant to compromise. The result is a source of permanent divisiveness that has driven our political parties into the hands of extremists on both sides. This is bad for everyone, and it is arguably getting worse.

Happily, there are such things in the United States as regional and local sensibilities and differences. That’s natural in a country as large and with social origins as diverse as ours. Following from the principle of subsidiarity, judgments about abortion and homosexual rights should be rendered at the state level, and perhaps, in some cases, at the municipal or local level.

My own view is that decisions on abortion and homosexual marriage are inherently religious decisions, and that these decisions should be made among interested family members and their respective clergy. Where decisions are matters of consent and no living person can be construed as a victim of any judgment, government should have as little a role as possible in them. That is what liberty is all about, after all.

But of course, not everyone has a religious tradition or community to turn to, and some communal standards are certainly necessary at the outer limits of potential human behavior. If, say, a group of cultists whose members stood for the public execution of adulterers moved into your town, the larger community would have a natural right to prevent that if, as one would hope, it so desired. But it is clear that local communities, at a maximum individual states, have a much better chance of reaching working compromises on sensitive moral issues than the country as a whole. And if minorities within a community or state disagree with the local consensus reached on issues like abortion and homosexual marriage, they can always go someplace where the consensus is more to their liking. It’s a free, and thankfully a diverse, country.

Therefore, the two main parties should agree not to use the Congress as a platform from which to wage culture war against each other. We need to stop beating ourselves up in a battle no one can ever win at the national level. The party leaderships should also agree that, at the level of the states, every effort should be made to cooperate to define standards acceptable to the majority. That’s the best we can do, and it’s the least we should do.

OK, here's number 3.

No. 3: Repeal the 17th amendment

In 1913, the very structure of the checks and balances the Founders created for our Federal system was altered, and the result has been a disaster for true democracy. The Founders created a system with both “vertical” and “horizontal” balances. The horizontal ones we all know well: between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. The vertical ones inhered in our system of Federalism, especially in the balance between the interests of the states as states and the Federal government. The way that balance was insured is that the Founders directed that U.S. Senators be elected by State Houses. And they were—until 1913.

After the Civil War, Congress passed some really bad laws that compromised the workings of the original system, with the result that many people came to believe that the indirect election of the Senate was undemocratic and prone to corruption. But the result of changing the original system is that it has fallen to the Federal courts to preserve the interests of the states, something the Founders clearly never intended.

Worse, severing the sinews of accountability between local and Federal jurisdictions has enabled the vast growth of the Federal government and its bureaucracy at the expense of state policy responsibility. The result has been, in part, the substitution of administrative regulations for actual lawmaking, to the point that those who actually most influence our lives—the “reg” writers in the Federal bureaucracy—are not elected at all.

Ah, once again good intentions paved the road, if not to hell, then to a less democratic result. The direct election of the Senate was supposed to save democracy from the corruption of “smoke-filled rooms”, but the result has been to make the corruption of the Senate easier and more economical at the hands of today’s large corporate lobbies. And is the distance between an average citizen and his or her U.S. senators greater then, or now? Then, a citizen could “get to” a Senator though his or her local state government representative, someone a citizen was and is still far more likely to know and see face-to-face. Now that is essentially impossible for all but a tiny fraction of Americans.

The direct election of the Senate violates the sacred Jeffersonian principle now called subsidiarity—a high-falootin’ word that simply restates the common sense idea that the most efficient and effective solution for any social problem is the one as close to the problem as possible. What neighbors can settle, they should settle. What those in the same congressional district can settle, they should settle, for who knows their interests better than they do? Tip O’Neill was right to say that all politics is local—or should be, to the extent possible. What we’ve done since 1913 is make government more distant from the average person. We’ve made it harder to solve problems where there are most easily, most sensibly and most cost-effectively settled: locally.

This in turn is one of the deepest root causes of our civic participation crisis. Average people feel they have no voice, except to vote once every four years. They don’t see how they can participate in politics in a way that has a bearing on their own daily lives. It’s no wonder most people take no interest in local and state government: It doesn’t do much of anything that really affects them, except provide designer license plates for those who care about such things. 

The result is that what the late Mancur Olson called “the logic of collective action” takes over: Special interests, like developers, who are few in number but who have big and well-focused stakes, win out over the vast majority who have smaller and more diffuse stakes.
Repeal the 17th amendment and all that will start to change. If your State House elected your two U.S. Senators, as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and their colleague intended, you would damn sure take more of an interest in them. So would your neighbors, and then local special interests would not be able to get away with the semi-legal larceny they now practice on a massive scale.

We need to reinvigorate political life in America on the level that makes it real for ordinary citizens. We need to make it possible for people to participate meaningfully in public life. PTAs are great, and so are voluntary neighborhood civic associations. But they’re not enough; that’s not what the Founders had in mind. We need to return the original balance back to our Federal system. We must repeal the 17th amendment. It won’t be as easy as repealing Prohibition, but it’s even more important—and that’s really saying a lot if you happen to like a nice single malt once in a while.

OK, national service is number 1. Here goes number 2. 

No. 2: Ban the funding of public education from property taxes.

Most Americans do not realize it, but our country has gone backwards over the past twenty years in terms of residential segregation, and our public schools still do not provide a level playing field for our children largely because of it.

Let me mince no words here: Black incomes on average are lower than white and “other” incomes, and most black neighborhoods are poorer than most white neighborhoods. Since most public education is funded mainly from property taxes, that explains why schools in predominantly black districts have a smaller resource base with which to fund education. That contributes at least some to inferior education, which in turn reinforces the pattern of relatively lower black incomes, which leads back around the circle of causality to their living in poorer neighborhoods with poorer schools. This causal cycle is inherently unfair and should be unacceptable to any nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

That said, per capita spending on students explains a lot less about educational outcomes than many observers claim. Nor can a truly level playing field be guaranteed for all students even at the young age of six years, because by that time many forms of inequality, cultural and social, are already in play. We can spend a veritable fortune per student, but if children return to homes where adults do not engage them in articulate conversation from a young age, where learning is not valued for its own sake, and where adults are not typically seen reading, it won’t matter most of the time. Educational aptitude is a matter of culture more than it is of either nature or nurture, narrowly defined, and there is a limit to what any liberal democratic government can do about it.

Still, public policy in a liberal democracy must concern itself with all issues of basic fairness, and it is very unfair that schools for some of our citizens are structurally under-funded compared to schools for others. That this unfairness breaks down largely along racial lines is a national scandal of which we should all be ashamed.

Of course, as everyone knows, the Federal government tries to smooth out inequities caused by funding education through property taxes with offset payments. Some city school districts, Philadelphia, for example, have more complicated funding mechanisms not based exclusively on property taxes. This smoothing process does not work that well, however, and even if it did, it is still wrong in principle to fund public education, an equal opportunity right for everyone, with a vehicle than cannot by its very nature ever be equal—property taxes. 

Besides, there is no logical reason why funding for education should not come out of the same general pool of tax money that pays for other public services. Congress should therefore ban the financing of public education from property taxes, period.

That ban would have several benign effects. First, it would almost certainly reduce property taxes in most places, which would aid home-ownership levels even if other sorts of fees and taxes might rise to offset the revenue loss. Second, if all services are funded out the same general revenue pool, it would force communities and their political leaders to make more explicit choices about how important education is to them relative to other services. Then people could choose neighborhoods and school districts based on quality, not on de facto racial criteria and the machinations of real estate fascists. This would, over time, probably reduce residential segregation and increase spending on education, although, to be honest, lots of other factors play into this equation. Fairness would win, and American society would win.

If there is a sound and unselfish argument against my proposal, I have yet to hear it.  Anyone want to try?