Recommended: The Roots of the Government Shutdown

George Friedman at STRATFOR has an interesting piece today: The Roots of the Government Shutdown.  He argues that the shutdown is the unintentional result of political reforms movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which took political power away from state-level political bosses who, while certainly susceptible to corruption, were not especially ideological, and delivered it to much more ideologically-driven groups who now see any compromise as betrayal of their principles.

Fareed Zakaria makes something like the same point in his book The Future of Freedom, in which he notes that legislators used to be able to make back-room deals (ie - compromises where each at least got half a loaf), but with the transparency forced by reformers in recent decades, all these negotiation now take place in public, and as soon as one side seems to be compromising they get a thousand phone calls and emails demanding that they not compromise, which pretty well mucks up the political process.

It does seem to me like another case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions - the inevitable unintended consequences of what seemed at the time like good ideas.