Missing Issues
by George W. Liebmann
Issue 100 - January 30, 2008

Americans in both parties report themselves uninspired by the current crop of Presidential candidates. Yet Americans know that significant domestic problems are unaddressed: that the public high school system is a disaster area; that the savings rate is nonexistent, being discouraged by over-liberal credit and justified fear of eventual inflation; that transportation infrastructure is deteriorating; that both local and national policies favor sprawl development and the mismanagement of public lands; that families with young children are under great economic pressure, while the elderly are the darlings of the tax and benefit systems; and that police, prison, and judicial bureaucracies are ever-expanding.

The cause of these difficulties is found in the over-centralization of domestic government; in what Paul Freund described as "apoplexy at the center and anemia at the extremities." That in turn is the product of wars, both real and rhetorical (the Cold War, the wars on poverty, drugs, and terrorism), as well as a by-product of the Depression, when denial of direct federal authority stimulated resort to conditional grants to state and local government, destructive of the competence of both donor and recipient. The result resembles Tocqueville's description of the ancien regime : "One set of people did the actual administration; another set laid down the abstract principles on which all administration ought to be founded; one set took the particular measures indicated by routine; the other set proclaimed general laws without ever thinking of the means to apply them; one set had the conduct of affairs; the other set, the control of mind."

Failure of leadership has been aggravated by erosion of the devices once provided for selection of high public officers: the Electoral College; its successor, the party convention; and the indirect election of Senators. Tocqueville urged an opposite development: "Able men retire from the political arena, in which it is so difficult to retain their independence, or to advance without becoming servile...the American republics will be obliged more frequently to introduce the plan of election by an elected body into their system of representation or run the risk of perishing miserably among the shoals of democracy."

The products of a system are rarely constructive critics of it. President Nixon's timid efforts on behalf of revenue sharing are almost the lone recent exception. Tax sharing, like that adopted in the major Western European countries is nowhere on the political agenda. One party favors Washington control; the other disparages anything that might enhance the legitimacy and size of government. Since the demise of the tax reforms fostered by President Reagan and Senator Bradley and the re-institution of preferences for capital gains, Tocqueville' description of the French tax system has become apropos: "in France, the nobles retained to the very end exemption from taxation to console them for having lost the right to govern... taxation had for its object not to reach those most capable of paying it but those least able of protecting themselves."

There are other measures that are not on the agenda. There are efforts to foster self-governing public charter schools, but no suggestion that all state schools be given their own boards, as in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Germany. The Democrats, urged on by teachers' unions, foster centralization at every turn; the Republicans tilt at the windmill of privatization and vouchers without educating the public as to how bad the schools are. The taxation of families with small children has vastly increased since the 1960s, with increases in the rate and base of the payroll tax and a decade in which personal exemptions were eroded prior to their indexing. The Norwegians and Canadians have effectively devolved to families responsibility for pre-school care by providing adequate tax credits; the American approach involves subsidies and credits for institutional care only.

Overreaching federal legislation mandates only criminal-law approaches to the 'drug war'. Schools and colleges are reluctant to assume responsibility for testing and treatment programs when the effect of so doing may be to disclose law violations by their students. Despite forty years of constant use levels and a growing flood of corruption and dirty money, even the most modest state experiments are precluded by law and opposed by a federal propaganda machine.

The elderly receive expanding and unsustainable social benefits. The devices that other nations have used to foster mutual aid, family responsibility, and self-help, incentives for accessory and duplex apartments and small tax concessions for cooperatives of the elderly, are unspoken of.

The troubled portions of cities are showered with federal programs by the Democrats and ignored by the Republicans. The cooperative, developer-sponsored devices for block-by-block renewal known as 'land readjustment' are legally unauthorized in the United States, though responsible for the post-war renewal of Japanese, Korean and European cities. Although business improvement districts with assessment powers florish in New York, their creation elsewhere is anathema to municipal bureaucracies and prevented by state law.

Armed with the printing press, the federal Congress, President and bureaucracy, unlike their local counterparts, are fiscally undisciplined. No one, after Katrina and the savings and loan and sub-prime mortgage debacles can urge the superior efficiency of federal administration. No state could afford the orgy of prison-building that is the product of the federal sentencing guidelines. Until recently, the national government prevented congestion pricing on important public roads, and neither party has rushed to embrace it, though it is the only device that can give hard-pressed commuters relief in the short term. The antiquated regimes governing grazing and mineral rights on public lands are defended by the Republicans at the instance of business interests, their survival also owes much to the Democratic hostility toward any form of devolution or privatization. The suggestions of the Comptroller General, David Walker, a Democrat, have been anathema to both parties. The Republicans are intent on buying votes, as with the ethanol and farm-subsidy legislation and much of the defense budget; the Democrats fear that the punch bowl might be removed as they approach the table.

Someday, one of our politicians besides the doctrinaire Congressman Paul may re-discover the Messrs. Jefferson and Brandeis. He or she will receive no help from our press, which is now more centralized than the government, but may find greater popularity than the current crop of candidates.

George Liebmann, a Baltimore lawyer and currently a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Cambridge, is the author of a number of books on local government, including Solving Problems Without Large Government (Praeger,1999), reprinted as Neighborhood Futures (Transaction Books, 2004)