The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [105]
Defeating the corporatocracy is, of course, easier said than done. American politics is a deeply entrenched, mutually supportive duopoly of parties, while the public is distracted and swayed by propaganda. Even if we know the means needed to break the power/money nexus, getting them adopted will require active political struggle. My guess is that it will be the rise of a credible third party, focused heavily on removing money from politics, that will sooner or later break the duopoly. It’s not as if the problem is so complex that it is hidden from view. It is widely known, but the public does not know where to turn. Any political movement that offers a way forward will tap a very deep vein of disappointment, anger, and political mobilization. A new political party can be combined with other forms of political agitation—consumer boycotts, protests, media campaigns, and social networking efforts—to put the most egregious leaders of the corporatocracy on notice. As I discuss in the next chapter, my belief is that the young generation of Millennials, today’s young people aged eighteen to twenty-nine, will have both the motive and the means to take on this challenge.
Restore Public Management
The constant “reinvention” of government has amounted mostly to poorly supervised handouts for private contractors, such as Halliburton and Blackwater in the war zones and the “Beltway bandits” who swarm around the U.S. development aid programs. The extent of contracting vastly exceeds agencies’ ability to oversee the contractors’ work. The contracting process, frequently no-compete arrangements, encourages corruption on an unprecedented scale. Tens of billions of dollars have gone astray in recent years while the “war lobby” encourages Congress to prolong the senseless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The proper approach is to rebuild public management, not to turn it over to voracious private firms.
A starting point for proper public management would be a significant increase in trained professional managers within the departments, recruited on the basis of salaries competitive with those in the private sector. Political appointments would be reduced in number and converted to senior civil service appointments. Renewed efforts would be made to monitor, evaluate, and audit all outsourced programs. The enormous, corrupt, and wasteful no-compete contracts of the Pentagon would be brought to an end.
Decentralize
America is an enormous and diverse country that can be managed only with considerable local variation in its policies. For a long time, the political Left has routinely looked to Washington to impose its will on the entire country, on social issues such as sexual mores, income redistribution, education policy, health care, and other issues. These efforts have mostly backfired. Rather than finding compromises on these contentious issues that allow for local variations in policies, pressures for Washington-imposed uniformity have often led to an anti-Washington backlash with no results at all. It is time for those in favor of a more activist government to accept the doctrine of subsidiarity. This doctrine, as I noted earlier, holds that policy problems should be addressed at the most local level of government that is capable of providing a solution. Education, health, roads, water treatment, and the like can generally be addressed locally. Most tax collection, on the other hand, should be national, to reduce the serious problem of tax competition between states and localities.
There is another compelling reason for decentralization of social services. The most powerful tool for breaking extreme poverty is a holistic community-based development strategy that combines vocational training and job placement, early childhood development, educational upgrading,