‘Nuff said.
CommentsCategory Archives: Public Policy and Governance
Sometimes, It Comes Back to Bite You in the You-Know-What
It’s no secret that Arizona’s mean-spirited Immigration law was prompted primarily by animus against brown folks. The state that nurtured racist sheriff Joe Arpaio saw much of the law struck down by the Supreme Court last term (oh, that pesky 4th Amendment!), but not after beginning to see what policy wonks like to call–delicately–negative unintended consequences.
Now the libertarian Cato Institute has issued an analysis of Arizona’s SB 1070, titled “The Economic Case against Arizona’s Immigration Laws.” The upshot: the laws did–and continue to do–grave damage to the state’s economy. According to Cato, the 2012 “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” joined with the (less Soviet-sounding) earlier “Legal Arizona Workers Act” to raise the costs of hiring all employees and create what Cato calls “regulatory uncertainty for employers,” driving many out of the states. Cato’s findings are consistent with headlines a couple of months back pointing to the problem faced by state farmers who could not find laborers willing to pick their crops; a significant amount of produce ended up rotting on the ground.
According to the Cato report,
“SB 1070’s enforcement policies outside the workplace drove many unauthorized immigrants from the state, lowered the state’s population, hobbled the labor market, accelerated residential property price declines, and exacerbated the Great Recession in Arizona.”
Ain’t karma a bitch?
CommentsCivility, Civic Literacy and Public Service
There is a robust debate underway about what it will take to attract the best and brightest of our young people to public service. As someone who has taught public affairs for 15 years—and with several years of government service in my own background—I have a theory that I would sum up as “civility, civic literacy and a meaningful opportunity for service.”
By “civility,” I mean a collegial and supportive workplace in which partisan political considerations take a back seat to achievement of the common good. By “civic literacy,” I mean familiarity with accepted understandings of America’s history and constitution. And by “a meaningful opportunity for service,” I mean an approach to administrative practice that balances ends and means in pursuit of the public interest.
There was an interesting symposium on political civility in a recent academic journal. The articles wrestled with confounding questions: what is the difference between argumentation that illuminates differences and rhetoric that “crosses the line”? The consensus seemed to be that incivility is rudeness or impoliteness that violates an agreed social standard.
I’m not sure we have agreed social standards in this age of invective, but surely rhetoric that focuses on, and disrespects, persons rather than positions should count as uncivil. (An example of civility in political argument might be Dick Lugar’s often-repeated phrase “that is a matter about which reasonable people can differ.”)
One of the most trenchant observations came from a professor who attributed the gridlock in Washington and elsewhere to “partisan one-upmanship expressed in ways that do not show respect for those with differing views.” In other words, if your motivation is simply to beat the other guys–to keep the President from a second term, for example–and if that motivation outweighs any concern for the public good, civility is absent and governing is impossible.
The reason politicians no longer “respectfully disagree” with each other, the professor pointed out, is that they do not in fact respect their opponents. For a variety of reasons, they hardly know them, and it’s easy to demonize people you don’t know.
Add to that an even more troubling aspect of today’s politics, a lack of civic literacy abetted by disregard for fact and truth and enabled by partisan television, talk radio and the internet. Survey after survey shows that people on the left and right alike get their “news” from sources that validate their biases. Worse, we have lost much of the real news, the mainstream, objective journalism that fact-checks, that confronts us with inconvenient realities. In such an environment, it becomes easier to characterize those with whom we disagree as buffoons or worse, unworthy of our respect. It is easier still if we lack even an elementary grounding in the origins and philosophy of American government, a lack confirmed by one dispiriting survey after another.
There is ample research confirming the existence of a worrisome civic deficit. I have reported much of it in this blog. If nature abhors a vacuum, as the old saying has it, it should not surprise us that citizens accept the spin and outright fabrications of the pundits and “talking heads” who have political axes to grind.
When political discourse is so nasty, and regard for truth so minimal–when the enterprise of government has more in common with a barroom brawl than a lofty exercise in statesmanship–is it any wonder that so many of our “best and brightest” shun politics? Forget elective office–who wants to go to work for a government agency the very existence of which is regarded as illegitimate by a substantial percentage of one’s fellow-citizens?
Americans have spent the last thirty plus years denigrating the role of government and the value of public service to an audience ill-equipped to evaluate those arguments. Now we are paying the price for our neglect of civic education and our unwillingness to defend the worth of the public sector.
Americans have a bipolar approach to issues: it’s either all good or all bad. But government is neither. We don’t have to abandon critical evaluation of government’s performance, but we do need to remind citizens of government’s importance and value.
I firmly believe in the line from Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come. If we rebuild civic knowledge and respect for civility and public service, young people will answer the call.
A Question of Taxes
A couple of days ago, my class preparation required that I review an early American time-period that included both Shays Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. Both–as those of you familiar with this particular time period will recall–were uprisings sparked by resistance to taxes.
Some things really never change.
I am not sufficiently familiar with citizens’ attitudes in other countries to be certain of this, but it certainly seems that this characteristic American anti-tax animus is unique; a piece of a none-too-attractive “American exceptionalism.” (When was the last time you saw Norwegians mounting a tax protest?) Americans are allergic to taxes, no matter how reasonable, no matter how necessary.
There are a couple of problems with this deeply-ingrained resentment. The first and most obvious is that it is unrealistic–not to mention unseemly–to demand services for which we are unwilling to pay. Someone once noted that taxes are the dues we pay for civilization, and I think that’s right. But the same Americans who would never dream of joining a country club and refusing to pay the dues needed to maintain the golf course and hire the help evidently have a very different reaction to assessments for membership in the polity. (Much of that animus seems based upon distaste for their fellow “members”–perhaps the problem is that we are fellow-denizens of a “club” they wouldn’t have chosen..?)
The second problem with the “pox on all taxes” attitude is that it focuses attention on the wrong issues. Governments require revenue in order to provide services; that’s a given. The questions we really need to ask are procedural: what is the best way to raise the dollars needed? Is the tax system fair and equitable? Does it inadvertently encourage unwanted behaviors (outsourcing of jobs, or shielding of assets in off-shore accounts) or discourage desirable ones? Are units of government operating efficiently?
It’s hard to ask those questions–let alone debate the answers–when people are whining about “redistribution,” and complaining about paying their share.
CommentsOut of the Mouths of Pundits
Peggy Noonan had a column a day or so ago in the Wall Street Journal in which she methodically detailed the ineptitude of the Romney campaign, and mused about what it might take to get that effort back on track. Much of what she had to say was familiar, conventional campaign wisdom to those of us who’ve spent lots of time in and around political contests, but it was her next-to-last paragraph that really struck me. Noonan wrote:
A campaign is a communal exercise. It isn’t about individual entrepreneurs. It’s people pitching in together, aiming their high talents at one single objective: victory.
That is demonstrably true–and not just true about political campaigns, but about the country’s political and social life. That said, it is a truth that has become, more or less explicitly, the hotly contested framework of this Presidential race.
Although the GOP took the President’s “you didn’t build that” remark out of context, Romney and the Republicans have made disagreement with what he actually did say the central theme of their message.
The President (and Elizabeth Warren, and others running for office this cycle) insist that “we are all in this together,” that citizens depend upon each other and our common institutions in myriad ways, large and small. The businessperson who succeeds deserves respect and admiration for his diligence and enterprise, but we also need to recognize the enabling role played by government: Mr. Successful ships his goods on roads provided by the taxpayer; he depends for security on police and firefighters supported by our taxes; he hires workers trained in our public schools. Ms. Businessperson sells those goods in markets that would not exist but for a legal and economic infrastructure that creates the rules and stability without which people do not have the confidence–or often the wherewithal–to consume. (People in third world countries are not inherently less entrepreneurial, but even if they create a better mousetrap, there are few people able to buy it.)
Recognizing the importance of social infrastructure does not diminish the value of success or hard work, as the Romney campaign has charged. To the contrary, it is the refusal to recognize our essential interconnectedness and interdependence that is not only arrogant, but dangerous and short-sighted.
The GOP’s chosen message has been “it’s all about us, the job creators. There are makers and takers, and we are the makers. And we did it all by ourselves.”
The Democratic message this cycle (with apologies to Ms. Noonan) has been “A country is a communal exercise. It isn’t about individual entrepreneurs. It’s people pitching in together, aiming their high talents at one single objective: a fair shake for everyone.”
As the President said at the Democratic Convention, it’s about citizenship.
Comments