America's response to the COVID pandemic has exposed some severe
weaknesses in our system of governance. President Trump's
ineffective (to be polite) response to the crisis got most of the
bad press, but in truth the whole system - federal, state and local
- largely failed, and likely would have failed even if the
presidency had been occupied by a more competent leader. In many
states even the vaccine rollout is still chaotic and unorganized.
George Will has an excellent article today in the Washington
Post entitled The
COVID-19 pandemic has taught us some brutal lessons about
governance. It is worth reading. It condenses the major
points made in a January 6 article in the Yale Law Journal Forum
by a lawyer named Philip Howard, entitled From
Progressivism to Paralysis. Read Will's article to get the
gist of the argument. But if you have the fortitude to read a long
academic article in a law journal, Howard's article is well worth
the effort. He details the long history, all the way from the
founding of the nation, of the evolution of our present
dysfunctional system. And most of the steps were taken with the best
of intentions.
The short version is that, with the best of intentions, we have
evolved a government bureaucracy so constrained by rigid regulations
rather than common sense that almost nothing can get done. Here is
the conclusion of Howard's article:
"No one designed this bureaucratic tangle. No experts back in the 1960s dreamed of thousand-page rulebooks, ten-year permitting processes, doctors spending up to half of their workdays filling out forms, entrepreneurs faced with getting permits from a dozen different agencies, teachers scared to put an arm around a crying child, or a plague of legal locusts demanding self-appointed rights for their clients. America backed into this bureaucratic corner largely unthinkingly, preoccupied with avoiding error without pausing to consider the inability to achieve success.
We tried to create a government better than people. Without our noticing, the quest for hands-free government started paralyzing daily choices. Now the broad sense of powerlessness is causing frustrated Americans to pound the table for change. America is at a crossroads. Just as when the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the 1960s rights revolution caused tectonic changes in how government worked, American government seems ripe for overhaul. What is missing is any vision for a new operating vision. To do so, we must return to first principles and rebuild government on the Framers’ vision of a republic activated by human responsibility and accountability."
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