Real ‘Change’ Agenda
by George Liebmann
Issue 111 - July 9, 2008

There is a clear danger that the domestic policy debate will be conducted ‘from the trenches,’ only on the basis of the usual issues dividing the parties: the ‘culture wars’ and increased government versus lower taxes. McCain and Obama have histories of independence from their parties’ vested interests and have a chance to break this mold. But as yet the McCain and Obama web sites offer promise of little save the usual. Those who perceive a need for expansion of the country's physical and social infrastructure will fail if their proposals focus, like too many of Obama's, on greater funding of centralized bureaucracies and their union clients. Those like McCain professing belief in limited government and low taxation will fail if they deny obvious needs and fail to provide devolved and efficient ways of satisfying them.

There are better answers to this than negative and defensive ones:

BUILDING-LEVEL SCHOOL BOARDS: The voucher argument will not be won anytime soon. More public sympathy will attach to proposals to make bureaucratic public schools into community schools by giving each school its own board with extensive managerial power. Such schools, unlike individually chartered schools, cannot be obstructed or strangled, one by one, through union pressure . No federal K-12 education funds should pass to a school that cannot manage them at building level. This concept was the basis of the Thatcher government’s 1988 Education Act as well as similar legislation in Australia and New Zealand. It ends the educationist monopoly by giving more than a million building-level board members from the business, professional and academic communities outside the union establishment insight into and power in public schools.

TEACHER CERTIFICATION REFORM: No federal K-12 education funds should pass to a state that requires more than one term of education courses as a condition of teacher certification. This will open up teaching to liberal arts graduates, housewives returning to the labor force, and military and law enforcement retirees. All of these are important constituencies.

SCIENCE AND MATH PAY SUPPLEMENTS: A large portion of existing federal aid to education should be reserved for salary supplements for teachers in disciplines in short supply: teachers of science, math, critical languages, the blind, and the seriously physically disabled. Salary supplements for mature teachers, not scholarships for neophytes, are required. Districts declining to provide them because of single-salary-scale union contracts should not receive federal aid. The scientific, academic, industrial; and medical sectors are important constituencies and can be made to understand this issue.

VETERANS’ EDUCATION: The G.I. Bill should be returned to its original nature by providing funds adequate for attendance at private colleges, not merely community colleges; R.O.T.C. scholarships should also be enlarged. The pending bill goes some distance in this direction, but not far enough. Encouragement should be given to delayed college entry for students who in Emerson’s words "do not postpone life but live already." Short-term concerns about military retention can be addressed by delayed introduction of new rules, or ‘grandfathering’ of old ones or, as in the currently pending bill, by allowing transfer of benefits to family members..

DISTANCE LEARNING: Colleges should be encouraged to develop programs for mature women desiring to continue their education. Distance (internet) learning is underdeveloped in the United States because of the influence of higher education bureaucracies; it is of particular value to women with child care responsibilities and should be promoted.

CHILD CARE: The existing child care and day care credits should be restructured and focused on pre-school children, as in Norway and Canada, so that more women will have the practical opportunity to stay home or work part-time before they enter school, an important purpose to those concerned with what Learned Hand called "The Preservation of Personality". "Parents", Bertrand Russell observed 80 years ago, "tend to be fond of their children and do not want them made the subjects of political schemes. The State cannot be expected to have the same attitude."

COOPERATIVE PRESCHOOLS: Cooperative pre-school playgroups of the type familiar in Britain and New Zealand should be fostered with publicity and tax credits. These are less expensive than unionized schools and have the advantage of keeping parents in touch with their children and the parents of their children’s friends.

HOUSING: The existing housing stock is the sleeping giant of housing policy. Much housing is of a size exceeding family needs by reason of falling family size and the incentives to over-building provided by the mortgage interest deduction, the last middle-class tax shelter. Homeowners should be encouraged to install second kitchens and accessory, mother-in-law or duplex apartments, a mainstay of German and Japanese housing policy. Modest tax credits to foster creation of accessory units in owner-occupied single family homes would be helpful in publicizing the concept, which would also be helpful to small home improvement contractors, including minority contractors, in a recession period. Fears of neighborhood deterioration are mitigated by requirements that homes receiving the credit remain owner-occupied..

ZONING REFORM: This should be fostered by publication of model codes, the way that zoning was originally fostered by Herbert Hoover, to do away with land-wasting and cost-increasing lot size and setback requirements and to eliminate restrictions on very small home-based business and convenience stores and cost-increasing requirements for unduly wide collector roads in new developments.

TIMESHARES: These should be given special incentives vis-a-vis other forms of second-home development, as a land and environment conservation measure.

URBAN REDEVELOPMENT: The system of developer-driven redevelopment known as land readjustment familiar in the Far East and Europe should be fostered. This provides an alternative to public eminent domain by allowing landowners on a block to cooperatively assemble and develop land, and would be of great value in inner cities. There is finally interest in such approaches, as can be seen from the lead article on Land Assembly Districts in the April 2008 Harvard Law Review.

CONGESTION CHARGING: Time of day pricing of roads, which can be revenue-neutral where charges are rebated pro rata to licensed drivers in the affected area, is the only device which can, in the near term, remedy traffic congestion in major metropolitan areas. Here technology is well ahead of politics.

OLD AGE CLUBS: These provide much of the basis for care of the elderly in Japan, and were fostered there through very modest tax credits. They facilitate mutual aid among the elderly, displacing costly social services, and also allow cooperative organization of health clinics, immunizations, and checkups.

HEALTH CARE: Rather than viewing health care as a unitary system, primary care, the part most ready for reform, should be looked at separately. An obvious device would be provision to each patient of an annual voucher for primary care, essentially the basis on which the British health service functioned for its first 80 years. This worked well and was highly popular and inexpensive, until it was under-funded in the 80s. It is distinct from specialist and hospital care, which require market signals, and are best dealt with through a combination of catastrophic insurance, medical savings accounts, and possibly a ‘medical chapter 11' allowing medical debts to be paid off over an extended period of years and factored by the providers.

DRUGS: As to the less seriously addictive drugs, notably marijuana, existing federal drug policy has stifled state initiatives and made the criminal law the weapon of first resort, indeed the sole weapon. Schools and colleges are reluctant to embark on testing and treatment programs if doing so is perceived as running the risk of incriminating their students. Careful use of mandatory testing has limited drug abuse in the military and workforce; removal of the federal criminal penalties on simple possession of small quantities is needed if there is to be a serious demand-side approach to drug abuse. This does not imply tolerance of drug abuse--the problem of the spaced-out student is a real one--, but rather the use of more effective methods to combat it at an early stage. Excessive criminalization to the exclusion of other approaches will lead to the militarization of the ‘drug war’, seen already in our border areas and in Mexico and Latin America.

TAX SHARING: Both parties lament the present state of federal domestic programs. the Democrats for their insufficiency and the Republicans for their bureaucracy and restrictiveness. The major Western European countries, most notably Germany, but more recently France, Italy, Spain, and Britain as well, have in the post-war period accorded state or regional governments, and in France and Germany municipal governments, guaranteed shares of the yields of national growth taxes. Since the Nixon Administration’s useful but short-lived revenue-sharing measures, there has been little American interest in these devices. They would produce a somewhat larger, but much more efficient and responsive public sector, but offend against party dogmas. They deserve another look.

CRIME AND TERRORISM: The juvenile reactions of the Clinton and Bush administrations in response to the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 have given rise to a dangerous growth of federal criminal jurisdiction and of the size of federal policing and criminal justice agencies. It is encouraging that Congress has belatedly awakened to the possibility of abuses by curbing the President’s ability to circumvent Senate confirmation of U.S. attorneys and by reversing ‘stealth’ legislation allowing the President to displace local law enforcement in broadly defined emergencies. The fact that local governments in the United States have the capacity to act without federal approval is a source of strength, not of weakness. The appropriate federal role is that suggested in the writings on federal of James Madison and John Stuart Mill: dissemination of information about effective practices, not the supplanting or directing of subordinate governments. The best answer to terrorism is a stiff upper lip and the strengthening of normal institutions of government, not the propagation of a ‘great fear’ and the centralization of control in a frequently erratic ‘unitary executive."

All of these suggestions appeal to suburban and independent voters beyond the usual Democratic and Republican constituencies. All are de-centralist, and do not accord congressmen opportunities to cut ribbons. They partake of the same enabling characteristics as the most successful federal and state laws in the nation’s history: the Northwest Ordinance and its land subdivision law; the Homestead Acts, the Morrill Act; the federal mortgage-guarantee programs; the G. I. Bill of Rights; the state municipal incorporation and general incorporation laws; and the state laws authorizing residential community associations and condominium associations. One cannot expect prodigies of transformative thinking and planning in the confusion and turbulence of presidential campaigns. But if the Messrs. McCain and Obama truly wish to ‘break the molds’ of their respective parties, they would do well to proclaim some willingness to at least look at such suggestions.

George Liebmann, a Baltimore lawyer and recently Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge is the author of Solving Problems Without Large Government: Devolution, Fairness, and Equality (Praeger 2001), reprinted as Neighborhood Futures (Transaction Books, 2005) and The Little Platoons: Sub-Local Governments in Modern History (Praeger 1995 ) and head of the Calvert Institute for Policy Research, Inc.