The old-fashioned school districts that provided me with a
convenient example in last week’s post here on The Archdruid
Report represent a mode of politics that nobody, but nobody, talks
about in today’s America. Across the
whole landscape of our contemporary political life, with remarkably few
exceptions, when people talk about the relationship between the political
sphere and the rest of life, the political sphere they have in mind consists of
existing, centralized governmental systems.
That’s as true of those who denounce political interference
in the lives of individuals and communities, by and large, as it is of those
who insist that such interference can be a very good thing. It’s as though, in
the American collective imagination, the political sphere consists only of the
established institutions of government, and the established—and distinctly
limited—ways that individual citizens can have an influence on those
institutions. The idea that citizens
might create their own local political structures, for purposes they themselves
choose, and run them themselves, using the tools of democratic process, has
vanished completely from our national conversation.
Less than a lifetime ago, however, this was a standard way
of making constructive change in America.Local school districts were only one example, though they
were probably the most pervasive. Most of the time, when people in a community
wanted to create some public amenity or solve some community problem, they did
it by creating a local, single-purpose governmental body with an elected board
and strictly limited powers of taxation to pay the bills. Sewer districts, streetcar lines, public
hospitals, you name it, that’s usually how they were run. The state government had supervision over all
these bodies, which was normally taken care of by—you guessed it—state boards
whose members were, once again, elected by the general public.
Was it a perfect system?
Of course not. The interlocking
checks and balances of board supervision and elections were no more foolproof
than any other mode of democratic governance, and a certain fraction of these
single-purpose local governmental bodies failed due to corruption or
mismanagement. Still, a substantial majority of them do seem to have worked
tolerably well, and they had a crucial advantage not shared by today’s more
centralized ways of doing things: if
something went wrong, the people who had the power to change things were also
the people most directly affected.
If the management of your local sewer district turned out to
be hopelessly incompetent, for example, you didn’t have to try to get a distant
and uninterested state or federal bureaucracy to stir out of its accustomed
slumber and do its job, nor did you have to try to find some way to convince
tens of thousands of unaffected voters in distant parts of the state to cast
their votes to throw somebody out of office for reasons that didn’t matter to
them in the least. The right to vote in the
next sewer board election was limited to those people who were actually served
by the sewer district, who paid the bills of the district with their monthly
assessments, who’d had to deal with balky sewers for the last two years, and
were thus qualified to judge whether a “Throw the Rascals Out” campaign was
justified. Keeping control of the system in the hands of the people most
directly affected by it thus served as a preventive to the serene indifference
to failure that pervades so much of American government today.
It might be worth proposing as a general rule, in fact, that
democratic governance works best when the people directly affected by any
function of government have direct control over those people who run that
function of government, subject to appropriate oversight by those responsible
for maintaining the public commons. In
the case of our imaginary sewer district, that means giving those who live
within the district the sole power to choose members of the board, while
placing the local board under the supervision of a state board tasked with
making sure local decisions didn’t violate state public health standards and
the like. In the case of the school districts described in last week’s post, it
meant giving the local school boards broad powers to set policy for the schools
they administered, giving citizens who lived within the school district the
sole right to vote in school elections, and placing the school boards under the
supervision of a state board of education that was charged with enforcing a few
very broad educational standards, health and safety regulations, and so on.
As long as the roles of state and federal governments
remained that of policing the commons, the system worked quite well—better, by
most measures, than the failed equivalents we have today. What put paid to it was the explosive spread
of government centralization after the Second World War, and this in turn was
driven by the imperial tribute economy I described earlier in this series of
posts: the set of deliberately
unbalanced economic arrangements by which something like a third of the world’s
wealth is channeled every year to the five per cent of humanity that live in
the United States.
The linchpin of local control, as it turned out, was local
funding. Sewer districts, school
districts, and all the other little local governmental bodies received all
their funding directly from the people they served, by whatever arrangements
the voters in the district had accepted when the district was founded. When
federal and state governments gained the power to dangle million-dollar grants
in front of the various local governments, most if not all of them took the
bait, and only later discovered that the power to grant or withhold funding
trumps every other form of political power in our society. That was how the local single-purpose
governments were stripped of their autonomy and turned into instruments of
centralized government, subject to micromanagement by state and federal
bureaucracies.
That process of centralization was justified in many cases
by claims of efficiency. Now of course
when somebody starts prattling about efficiency, the question that needs to be
asked is “efficient at what?” A screwdriver is highly efficient at turning
screws but very inefficient as a means for pounding nails; the modern corporate
economy, in much the same sense, is highly efficient at concentrating paper
wealth in the hands of the already rich, and very inefficient at such other
tasks as producing goods and services. It’s interesting to speculate about just
what it is that centralized bureaucracies can do more efficiently than local
single-purpose governmental bodies, but in retrospect, we can be certain that
running schools, sewer districts, and other public goods do not belong in that
category.
I discussed last week some of the reasons for thinking that
today’s massively centralized American education system is much less effective
at teaching children to read, write, calculate, and exercise the other basic
skills essential to life in a modern society than the old-fashioned, locally
managed, locally funded school districts of the not so distant past. The responses I fielded to those comments
intrigued me. One typical commenter insisted that she found it “incredibly hard
to believe” that educational standards in the one-room schoolhouses of
yesteryear were higher than those in school districts today. Now of course it
takes only a glance at the old McGuffey’s Readers, the standard reading
textbooks in those one-room schoolhouses, to show that levels of reading
comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary that were considered normal at every
elementary school grade level in the late 19th century were vastly greater than
those achieved in today’s schools; in fact, the reading ability assumed by the
first pages of the 8th grade McGuffey’s is by no means common in American
college classes today.
The collapse of educational standards that can be observed
here, and in a hundred similar examples, has had many causes. Still, it’s far from irrelevant to note that
a similar collapse has taken place in many other areas in which the old system
of independent local governmental bodies has been replaced by micromanagement
by state or federal bureaucracies. That
collapse has been discussed nearly as widely in the media as the implosion of
American education, and it’s ironic to note that, just as media discussions of
public education’s breakdown have gone out of their way to avoid considering
the role of overcentralization in driving that collapse, the media coverage of
the parallel breakdown I have in mind has been just as careful to avoid
touching on this same issue.
The collapse in question?
The disintegration of America’s infrastructure in recent decades.
A great many factors, to be sure, have had a part in
creating the crisis in our national infrastructure, just as a great many
factors have contributed to the parallel crisis in our national public
education system. In both cases, though, I’d like to suggest that
overcentralization has played a crucial role in both crises. There are at least
three reasons why, all other things being equal, a centralized government
bureaucracy will by and large be less able to provide good schools, working
sewers, and other public goods than a local governmental body of the type we’ve
been discussing.
First, centralized government bureaucracies aren’t
accountable for their failures. To
borrow a bit of gambler’s slang, they have no skin in the game. No matter how disastrous the consequences of
an administrative decision made in the state or national capital, the
bureaucrats who made the decision will continue to draw their pay, exercise
their authority, and pursue whatever fashionable agendas they picked up in
college or elsewhere, even if their actions turn out to be hopelessly
counterproductive in terms of the goals their bureaucracy ostensibly exists to
serve. Local single-purpose governmental
bodies by and large don’t have that freedom; if the local sewer board pursues
policies that fail to provide adequate sewer service to the people in the sewer
district, the members of the board had better look for other jobs come the next
local election.
Second, centralized government bureaucracies provide many
more places for money to get lost. If you’ve got a bureaucracy at the national
level—say, the federal Department of Education—another bureaucracy at each
state level—say, state Departments of Education—and still another bureaucracy
at the local level—say, current school districts, a good many of which have
hundreds of employees filling administrative positions these days—and all of
these are doing a job that used to be done by a handful of employees working
for each school board, one whale of a lot of money that might otherwise go to
improve schools is being siphoned off into administrative salaries and expenses. The same thing is true of the money that
might go to repair bridges and sewer pipes; how much of that goes instead to
pay for administrative staff in the federal Department of Transportation and
the equivalent state and county bureaucracies?
All this is aside from graft and corruption, which is also an issue;
it’s a good general rule that the more hands money must pass through on its way
to a project, the higher the likelihood that some of those hands will have
sticky fingers.
The third reason is subtler, and ties back into the proposal
I made several weeks back, that the proper role of government is that of
preserving the public commons. To make a commons work, there needs to be some
system in place to monitor the state of the commons, assess how changes will
impact it, and prohibit those things that will cause harm to it. On a purely local level, as Elinor Ostrom
showed, a self-regulating commons is easy to establish and easy to maintain,
since it’s in the direct self-interest of everyone who benefits from the
commons to prevent anyone else from abusing it. The local single-purpose
governmental bodies discussed in this week’s post rely on that logic: if you
depend on the local sewer board to provide you with sewage service, to return
to our example, you have a very strong incentive not to permit the board to
ignore its duties.
Still, for a variety of reasons, the mechanisms of local
government don’t always function as they should. It’s for this reason that the American
political tradition long ago evolved the useful habit, already referred to, of
making the decisions of local government subject to review at the state level,
by way of the supervisory boards discussed earlier. The state boards, like the local boards they
supervised, were elected by the voters, so they remained accountable for their
failures. More importantly, though, was the simple fact that the officials
tasked with assessing the legality and appropriateness of policies were not the
same officials that were making the policies.
This is a basic principle of cybernetics, by the way. If
you’ve got one system carrying out a function, and another system monitoring
how well the first system carries out its function, you need to make sure that
the only input the second system receives from the first system is the input
that allows the second system to carry out its monitoring function. Otherwise
you get feedback loops that prevent the second system from doing what it’s
supposed to do. That’s exactly the problem we have now. When public schools are being micromanaged by
regulations drafted by federal bureaucrats, who is assessing the legality and
appropriateness of those regulations? The same federal bureaucrats—and whether
you analyze this by way of cybernetics, politics, or plain common sense, this
is a recipe for disaster.
These three factors—the lack of accountability endemic to
centralized professional bureaucracies; the tendency for money to get lost as
it works its way down through the myriad layers of a centralized system; and the
unhelpful feedback loops that spring up when the policy-making and monitoring
functions of government are confounded—go a long ways to explain the cascading
failure of many of the basic systems that an older, more localized, and less
centralized approach to government used to maintain in relatively good
order. The accelerating decline of
American public education and the disintegration of the national infrastructure
are only two examples of this effect in practice; there are plenty of others—a
great deal of what’s wrong with America’s health care system, for example, can
be traced to the same process of overcentralization.
I’m pleased to say, though, that help is on the way. On
second thought, “pleased” is probably not the right word, since the help in
question will almost certainly bring about the wholesale implosion of a great
many of the basic systems that provide public goods to Americans, and its
arrival will have to be followed by the slow, costly, and potentially painful
rebuilding of those systems from the ground up.
The source of that unwelcome assistance, of course, is the twilight of
America’s global empire. In the absence
of the torrents of unearned wealth American society currently receives from the
imperial wealth pump, a great many of the centralized systems in place
today—governmental, corporate, and nonprofit—will probably stop functioning
altogether. Those who think they will cheer this development are invited to
imagine how they will feel when their sewers stop working and nobody, anywhere,
is willing or able to do anything about that fact.
As the impact of America’s imperial decline echoes through
the fabric of the nation, a great many of the basic systems of everyday life
will need to be repaired and replaced.
One of the very few tools that might enable that to be done effectively
is the system of local single-purpose governmental bodies that I’ve discussed
in this post. As municipal services
become intermittent or stop altogether, schools shut down, and infrastructure
collapses, people with skin in the game—local residents, that is, who want
basic services enough to tax themselves at a modest rate to pay for them—could
readily use the old system to pick up the pieces from imploding government
bureaucracies.
Equally, the same process can be used to pursue any number
of public goods not currently served at all by existing governmental systems.
All that’s needed is for something that used to be an integral part of American
community life to be rediscovered and put back to work, before the imperial
structures that replaced them finish coming apart. Mind you, the system of local single-purpose
government bodies is far from the only elements of an older way of community
that could use being rediscovered and restored; next week we’ll talk about
another.
**********************
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