Thinking Aloud

...Despite the large number of journalists who flock about the various government agencies, the press prints mainly summaries of press releases...

...News is what happened, not what didn't happen...

...The situation among political scientists is not very different...

...It is frightfully hard to get Americans interested in, or to take seriously, problems of administration...

...On the other hand, it never seemed to lose a letter, which is in its own way a kind of minor miracle...

...Letters are so small, and the country is so big...

...Irving Kristol, formerly an editor of the British monthly Encounter, is now senior editor of Basic Books...

...The main reason I have come to this point of view is that I have come to know a little more about government...

...After all, who are the thousands of individuals who apply the tax laws...

...That is to say, they may lose a particular case in the tax courts-and then declare that no binding precedent has been established...

...Which means that all individuals and corporations, in exactly the same condition and with exactly the same case in law as the victorious plaintiff, must themselves go to court, at an expense that is never inconsiderable and may well be prohibitive...

...Perhaps no longer than it takes to read this column...

...Any law or any plan that requires for its execution a large number of disinterested and capable officials begins by asking the impossible and ends up looking for trouble...

...This helps explain why we have no first-rate book on, say, the immigration service...

...and even students of public administration are more concerned with affirming or disallowing generalities about "administrative behavior" than they are in critically examining the workings of any particular institution...

...Having this image in mind, I never could understand the bitterness with which the business community excoriated "red tape," "big government," and the like...

...This knowledge being in such short supply, a qualified writer usually ends up as an affluent lobbyist or consultant for those who do business with the agency...

...but bringing them into line will not solve the problem...

...A glaring example: The tax collectors apparently have the authority (where they got it, I do not know) to decline to lose on a controversial issue...

...Is it not about time that the highly developed nations followed suit...

...Lord knows they have a thankless job, and if there is such a thing as a right to a sour disposition, they are entitled to it...

...Thus it is, for instance, that though Columbia University is as close to Harlem as can be, and though this has created problems that every member of the University is keenly aware of, no Columbia sociologist has got around to publishing a study of Harlem...

...And, if you think about it, it is necessarily the case...

...I have, in addition, been fortunate enough to acquire some friends in the business and financial community -a compromising statement, this, in some circlesand have gained an appreciation of their problems...

...Yet they do so, every day...

...They occasionally do provide it...

...Lastly, the number of writers who have an intimate and sure knowledge of any particular government agency is infinitesimal...

...But I am no longer so blas?© about the way in which these responsibilities are exercised or these powers accumulated...

...In their absence, our housing program is administered with a routine stupidity by thousands of little men who, far from being able to cope with the housing problem, are swallowed up by it...

...The only kind of reform that would make a noticeable difference would be a simplification of the tax system so that far fewer people were needed to enforce it...

...For one thing, unless corruption or scandal of some kind is involved, it is not likely to make exciting or entertaining reading...

...I have not gone so far-I shall never be able to go so far-as to declare that the State is our Enemy...

...Some old acquaintances have settled on the New Frontier, and they are sufficiently new to government service not to take it for granted...

...But big government in the United States has reached a point where it is pressingly important for them to do so...

...The newly independent, "underdeveloped" nations are coming to realize this elementary truth as far as their ambitious planning schemes are concerned...

...But they must be a minority-simply because there are not that many fair-minded and publicspirited people around...

...For another, such reportage is fantastically expensive: Extensive research, traveling and interviewing is required...

...In a complicated society such as ours there is bound to be a considerable amount of red tape, and besides it isn't as if businessmen had to fill out the forms themselves-they are well provided with secretaries and lawyers and accountants for that sort of thing...

...In theory, one should be able to turn to the news magazines and journals of opinion for further information and enlightenment...

...My image of it has always been of a huge, slow-moving bureaucratic machine, composed in equal parts of people, paper and computers, administering the laws with a ponderous scrupulousness that might be exasperating but that also was a surety of thoroughness and fair play...

...The plan was not adopted, but I would guess that something not far short of it eventually will be...

...What with big business, big unions and big bombs, the notion of a small government is almost comic in its inadequacy...

...Put them in a position where they can exercise power-direct, personal power -over those who are more successful, and it would be contrary to human nature if such motives as envy and self-assertion did not come into play...

...The origins of this policy, its application, its near and remote consequences do not constitute "news...

...On the whole, they are not the most successful in their professions...

...but they also have grounds for believing they are being persecuted...

...And what is true for housing, is true for mental health...

...Our tax laws are so complicated that there literally are not enough competent people to apply them fairly and intelligently, on no matter what terms they were recruited...

...The major intellectual problem facing the American polity in the decades to come might well be: How can we realize the potentialities of big government without surrendering ourselves and our goals to the mercies of little men...

...My own recent-and, I hasten to add, rudimentary -knowledge of life at the top is almost entirely a matter of chance...

...Like most ordinary citizens, my acquaintance with government has been fleeting and fragmentary...

...but not often...

...Even if the Internal Revenue Service had a free hand with salaries, and an unlimited budget, not much improvement could be expected...

...Well, I've changed my mind somewhat...

...otherwise they would never have settled for employment at government salaries...

...They may well be out of line...

...And what is true for mental health, may be true for Medicare, or Federal aid to education, when these programs come into being...

...The post office, it is true, seemed awfully slow in its mail deliveries...

...This indeed seems to be the case...

...I do not doubt there are fair-minded and publicspirited men working for the department of Internal Revenue...

...What is true for taxes, is also true of housing...

...This kind of "journalistic" sociology, one is told, does not "pay off" within the profession...

...The drift of scholarship is determined primarily by academic rewards, and academic rewards are more closely tied to academic fashions than to what an outsider might judge to be the intrinsic significance of the work...

...Nor is it merely a question, as some say, of government salaries being "out of line" with income in business...

...And while I still think the standard anti-government rhetoric with which businessmen sprinkle their conversation is childishly silly, I am no longer inclined to wave it summarily aside as a passing paranoia...

...A new housing, or highway, or conservation policy is solemnly summarized in the Times, accompanied perhaps by a profile of the administrator who proudly announced it...

...The emphasis is inevitably upon policy-new policies make news-rather than upon the structure and functioning of the machinery itself...

...It is our ally-but a dubious, unreliable and occasionally even treacherous ally...

...They do have a persecution complex...

...Their reports, and even their casual remarks, have been thought-provoking, to put it mildly...

...Take the strange ways of the Internal Revenue people...

...And I still believe that a democratic government has inherent responsibilities and powers far greater than the Chamber of Commerce has ever been willing to concede...

...Only the other day, the National Institute of Mental Health unofficially proposed a national program for the mentally ill which could only begin to make sense if every psychologist and psychiatrist in the country were conscripted into government service...

...Not entirely -I still think that a lot of the chatter about the road to serfdom is little more than a form of special pleading...

...As now organized, the Federal housing program needs more competent and disinterested architects, economists, sociologists, city planners, real estate appraisers and welfare workers than the nation could ever hope to supply...

...If the policy is abandoned, of course, there is no press release and hence no news story...

...Such a state of affairs could hardly arise if, within the Internal Revenue Service, there were not a strong, personal animus toward businessmen...

...Nor has the American academic community been as much help as one might suppose...

...On the whole, I concluded, businessmen seemed to be demanding more freedom from governmental control and surveillance than the rest of us were getting, and probably more than was desirable for the common good...

...Nor has big government ever struck me as such an objectionable thing, in principle...

...But it is one thing for them to administer the law grimly, and quite another for them to administer it arbitrarily and even with a dash of malice...

...In America today, this is no easy matter...