Why is our Government Such a Mess? Can an election fix it? Are politicians, no matter how earnest in their promises, able to deliver on those promises? Just what should state and local administrations do versus the Feds? Keep reading for some insight to this problem.

By Robert E. Freer, Jr., President of The Free Enterprise Foundation

Fourteen months from now Americans will be going to the polls to elect a new Congress and the 44th president of the United States. There is no end of the list of applicants, but already the public is turning back to their favorite networks for their summer fare rather than waste their time watching uninteresting candidates talk about issues that do not connect with the lives of most of the electorate. If experience is any indicator, slightly less than half the electorate will vote “uninterested” in November of 2008 by failing to show up for the only polls that count-those open to all registered voters on election day.

That is hardly an original observation. The press and the League of Women Voters have been ringing their intertwined hands over our declining participation percentage for years. What is wrong with the electorate? Don’t they care? Don’t they realize how important it is to participate? Well, I do participate and will next year, but I can hardly blame the average voter for questioning the assumption that he or she can make a difference.

From the perspective of the non-voter, all politicians are the same, and if they aren’t, they are prevented from delivering honest, efficient government by the majority who are in politics as just another career. To a large percentage of the public, government has grown increasingly irrelevant to their everyday cares and needs. To most of us the old line, “I am here from the government to help you.” is said and felt with not much humor in their sarcasm. Today’s government is to be tolerated but not beloved.

Since our founding there has been strain between those who saw government as a help mate to commerce and those who saw it as a depriver of liberty. While that fear has burst forth from our lips in a partisan fashion, there is no consistency to those who are identified with either position. Liberals are just as prone to scream at the threat to liberty posed by some government initiative as are conservatives. I have as well complained in these pages often that the media and our electoral process divides us for monetary gain and destroys what little prospect there is that we can come together on a mandate for government. Meanwhile stymied government creates a blockage like a rock in a stream. The compulsion for a solution is like the downward pressure of the water on the rock which will either go with the flow or the flow will flow around it seeking its own path to its goal.

The retail politician looks at his job like a grocer. His customers want bridge money; he will “stock” money for bridges in his district or at least try mightily to get his “fair” share. His constituents are frightened about crime, and he or she will respond with money for enforcement and incarceration. That is fine as far as it goes but is shortsighted and destructive of any possibility that going forward government can play an effective role.

Technology, unabated immigration and a breakdown in social mores are transforming this country. Retail politics with its microscopic view of government’s role will ultimately result in its almost complete irrelevance. We need a “Cinemascopic” analysis to see how those needs which have heretofore been thought of as the province of government can best be provided. For those functions which should be primarily governmental in origin, the election process should bring us together not further divide us.

One of the main problems with government originated solutions for various public needs is that it is either not delivered, not delivered in a timely fashion or that the cost in tax dollars and increased bureaucracy wraps the solution in Hobson’s choices that seriously abridge personal freedom.

You can understand that is so if you think about the decades of layer upon layer of unrelated requirements for the delivery of any government originated “good.” Each federal program that in any way affects or is possibly affected by this new “good” requires staff, numerous reports on its effectiveness and its own compliance with a slew of prior program and statutory requirements resulting in a “cats cradle” of incoherent and ineffective regulation, all to justify a “good” that we can better figure out how to achieve without federal assistance…. And all this activity becomes a self serving justification for the bureaucracy that produced it.

Because of the information explosion, Congress is beset with pressure on programs that would have been state originated in the past, keeping the impact more focused and saving Congress and the Federal Executive Branch to focus on truly national issues. Let’s look at a few issues that are federal. Even there it is a mess.

Katrina relief is certainly one of those issues. Without focusing on questions of blame, a catastrophe of that magnitude calls for massive federal disaster assistance. But for what? Who is going to administer it, and what role does the private sector play? When I last wrote about this in December 2005, the private sector had provided 2.6 Billion in measurable donated dollars to Katrina connected relief. The latest figure is in excess of $6 Billion and growing. It continues to be effectively applied with minimal restrictions. As an interesting additional figure, Americans gave away to recognized charities 260 billion dollars last year.

Federal appropriated relief for Katrina is hard to calculate but exceeds 100 Billion mostly unspent dollars as the plethora of competing interests thrash out a politically acceptable solution and struggle with the restrictions inherent in the delivery of federal aide. There are too many politically significant interests to be satisfied and relief languishes.

Border control, Here again the federal government has the responsibility to provide for the security of our borders, and here again politics has prevented an effective solution being achieved. The public is disgusted. Although there is some movement to provide for more effective border control, most political pundits say it will be 2009 before Congress will deal with the issue again.

True tax reform: ditto, social security reform: ditto. We could have a tax system that is fair, which would have a 0 bracket amount that would eliminate many of those required to pay and still produce funds at a level commensurate with our current system. This president has tried for responsible solutions but was beaten by the special interest on both left and right that would rather not have a solution if it wasn’t their solution.

The pressure of the water on the rock is increasing. Is the rock going to wash downstream, or is the water going to flow around it? Increasingly the answer is flow around it. Since we haven’t faced up to our responsibilities on entitlements, circumstances themselves will force a non governmental solution. And on taxes, there is not a constituency that will support anything like the measures liberals are seeking that would cripple our competitiveness just as our competitors lower their taxes in an attempt to be capital friendly.

Government is proving itself irrelevant and the electorate is turning to non governmental organizations, other charities and the private sector to provide personalized solutions for our concerns. As they do so they also increasingly turn from our elective system.

About the author: Robert E. Freer, Jr. is President of The Free Enterprise Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor, at The Citadel and elected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence. A regular contributor to the Mercury, He can be reached by E-mail at The Citadel . Copies of his earlier columns can be found The Free Enterprise Foundation.

If you’d like to contribute an article to this collection please e-mail it for review .

Go to 2007 Business Ethics Articles from Why is our Government Such a Mess?