A Platform for the Nineteen-Eighties

...And of course, each embassy has been stratified so that the ambassador presides over an elaborate chain of command, at the bottom of which is the junior foreign service officer who actually writes the first draft of the report...

...By admission of the Civil Service Commission, hardly one of the system’s severest critics, 11.5 per cent of the federal employees are overgraded, at a cost to the taxpayers of $436 million a year...

...An emphasis on doing, on performance, could open up a wide variety of prpfessions where specific, technical skills can only be acquired by experience, but that are now monopolized by the credentialed...

...Here is a second special angle that should end...

...For most people, modern “democracy” amounts to an up-or-down choice every four years between two presidential candidates who sound very much the same, with the decision based on which one seems the lesser evil...

...One side benefit of the plan: since the students would be footing the bills, there is at least a chance they would be forced to think seriously about when...

...The regulations have come to protect the banks instead of the customers...

...America is aging rapidly...

...The poor mail service is hurting your business, perhaps...

...If it were seen as a way of fulfilling a responsibility to the community, rather than as a mandatory stint of short-term drudgery, and if those beyond the age of service nevertheless set an example by volunteering their own time, it might not have to be compulsory for long...

...In striving for equality, many women have come to see their own worth as too many men see theirs: by the size of their paychecks...

...We can’t all be experts, and we should be t h a n k f u l f o r t h a t . Experts tend to be specialists-their very knowledge and posit‘fon distorts their interests, and their vision...

...The first step in making America a less fractious and divided society, then, would be to establish a system that encouraged mediation over lawsuits, valued trust over legal procedure, and placed the common interest and the compromise over the “look out for number one” mentality...

...The second reason is the women’s movement...

...Between the elections, as the major issues are actually resolved, “informed consent” has been reduced to the crude speculations of opinion polling...

...Horsefeathers...

...A politically appointed typist could still be required to type 50 words-per-minute...

...As a result our health care system is one of the prime causes of inflation...

...Government salaries should make us reconsider the old axiom that you get what you pay for...

...And being just plain “teacher” was the status job at Columbia for a while...

...The option of universal service would provide an alternative, and some time to think things over...

...They were against the aircraft carrier when it was the weapon of the future...

...If paranoia is our national disease,” we wrote a few years ago, “then lawyers are its Typhoid Marys...

...The image of the times is the young Carter Administration lawyer, jogging onto the White House tennis court with his Head racket, his Adidas shoes, an alligator on his headband and a $1.20 bottle of soda water under his arm...

...If we had reliable evaluations of our state governments and consulting firms, how many of these jobs could we abolish...

...By this, we don’t mean demonstrations in the streets or violent mob actions...

...Less Representation, More Democracy Unfortunately, we have grown accustomed to leaving problems like choosing military hardware, or choosing social security plans, to the experts...

...Of course, there are advantages to having some employees with careerjob protection...

...A free national health service would also remove one more source of economic insecurityfear of medical calamity-that keeps the rest of us from breaking out of large organizations with generous health insurance programs...

...Not in the sense that it would result in unqualified employees...

...Yet its employees are among the highest paid, often making $2,000 to $4,000 more than their counterparts in the big California and New York state governments, and sometimes triple the amount paid state workers in rural and southern states...

...Think about who becomes a doctor in our society...

...Everyone knew everyone else, and when someone was not pulling his weight, the whole town was aware of it...

...Along with the return to the basics of reading and writing, there must be a return to the fundamentals of how our nation is governed...

...The Pentagon employs about a million civilians directly, but another 2.5 million “outside the walls” get their paychecks from the DOD...

...Free Ourselves To Work Put Doing Over Being We also need a radical change in attitude in how we look at our work...

...To bring federal salaries under some semblance of control, the President should declare a two-year moratorium on federal salary increases...

...what they need is help not jail sentences...

...Most fundamental is the exhilaration that comes from knowing that you have overcome the addiction to economic stability, that you are doing your job, not because it pays for your BM W, but because you love to use your talents-and that you’re ready to quit if that stops being the case...

...Our guess is about half...

...How many times have you heard someone justify passing up a new work opportunity because they “have two kids to put through school...

...It is time for those who govern to catch up...

...And there would be a greater chance of stocks going up in a vital economy that encouraged new investment...

...We used to have an ambassador to Chile, for instance, who reported directly to the Secretary of State...

...First, we want to end the politics of selfishness...

...It is the high cost of college...

...A universal service would have another extremely important benefit: it would begin to get Americans back into the habit of service, of giving to the country...

...Well, I guess nothing can be done,” you sigh, “but my congressman certainly seems to have done his best,” and you resolve to vote for him next time around...

...While the sons of the elite stayed in college, the poor and the uncredentialed were sent to do the fighting and the dying...

...In the end, we believe, this program would save the government money, both because it would take a fraction of the current welfare bureaucracy to administer, and because it would not cost anywhere near the $165 billion the government is going to pay next year in welfare programs and social security...

...Society could take away this excuse by providing a variant on the old GI bill to cover the cost of all post-secondary education...

...For example, after the passage of the civil service bill his union had opposed, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees threatened: ‘‘In the trenches every day, federal employees will work a little slower, wheels won’t turn quite as fast, applications won’t get processed, goods won’t get moved nearly as rapidly as they could...

...As long as we see the task of government in piecemeal terms, we will have an employment policy that pleases big management and big labor, and an education policy that benefits teachers and school administrators...

...But the thirst for titles has generated a stepladder of well-paid officials...

...Having men and women in a universal service would eliminate the feeling that anyone’s being exploited...

...Bring Back the Spoils System The way to break down the resistance to evaluation is with politics...

...We don’t have a plank for employment policy, a n d a n o t h e r plank f o r education policy...

...Keep Unions From Competing If businesses are going to give up their special angles, it’s only fair that unions should do the same...

...It didn’t used to be that way...

...One way to resolve the problem would be to have elected officials decide what to do...

...In everything from divorces to huge corporate deals, from fights over a plot of land to disputes over public policy, lawyers and the courts have come to play an increasingly prominent role...

...We can’t legislate away loneliness...

...He thinks his contribution to the world this year was writing a chunk of the Clean Air Act, which will mean Americans will lead pleasanter, more healthy lives...

...From the barn-raising to the wagon train, doing things for others was a symbol of pioneer America...

...Elsewhere in this issue, Joseph Nocera tells us how the latest scheme for evaluating the agencies-the inspector general program-is being turned into a crusade against white collar crime, when it could be asking questions about why it takes six tiers of officials to handle a single report from overseas...

...This elite-many of them good people, your friends and ours-has not been good for the country...

...The system should be changed because it’s costing us a fortune-the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the price of federal pensions could rise to $194 billion by 2015...

...Instead, shouldn’t we be outraged at the system of rigid and phony hierarchy that deprives people of the right to use their skills...

...One of its worst effects has been to discourage women to give of their time and their talents for free...

...For example, HEW has 144,000 federal employees, but it pays the salaries of another 980,000 through other organizations...

...Military officers can retire as early as their late thirties with 20 years of service, civilian officials can retire at age 55 after 30 years...

...These are the kinds of special privileges that, if stopped, would bring about lower prices and better service, even if accompanied by screams of anguish from the aggrieved industry...

...The tragedy is their own, not ours...

...But more important is the question of attitude...

...T o d a y , with down payments for a modest house in the $30,000 range, it takes a hefty, secure income to accumulate enough to even begin mortgage payments...

...The smug look on the civil servant’s face when he refers to “my deputy” is one of the more depressing incidents of life in Washington...

...But the private sector does offer one ray of hope that the civil service d o e s n ’ t : we’re s t u c k w i t h t h e government we’ve got, but private organizations can be displaced by new ones...

...Life can never be as safe a bet as some of the clauses in our employment contracts seem to imply...

...The millionaire could never get unemployment benefits or social security as he can now...

...The reason is simple: none of its children were being killed...

...If we can move some to action by eliminating unnecessary sources of economic insecurity, we can bring a lot more entrepreneurs out of the closet with positive incentives...

...It is a process we hope will accelerate...

...Unless we are prepared, and motivated, to give the experts our advice and consent, we can be sure that their choices will continue to be wrong...

...This is no less true of those who specialize in ruling...

...If they did nothing at all, that would be bad enough...

...but it is the sincerity of Nicholas and Alexandra sitting before the fire in the Winter Palace and wondering what can be done for the poor...

...Nobody wants to be the first to bite the bullet, the sucker who is talked into sacrificing with no assurance that anyone else will follow suit...

...They are too important for that-our lives are in their hands...

...At the individual level, a resistance to evaluation is built into the civil service system...

...We should certainly not leave the decision about weapons to the admirals and generals, whose record on these matters is bad beyond belief...

...The combination might convince more teenagers that “success” does not require a forced march through seven years of college and professional school, followed by ejection into the “real world...

...Since the latter are what create new jobs, and new productivity increases, we could restrict the capital gains tax break t o t h o s e new investments...

...Make the Capitalists Compete Too many businesses have angles in the form of unnecessary government protection...

...Even congressmen, with their ever more frequent citations t o Edmund Burke, have done their bit to legitimate the idea that people should choose an expert class to do their thinking for them, and not trouble themselves about the issues after they leave the polls...

...As long as people are functioning well, we should encourage them to continue doing so...

...Every American youth, after high school, or sometime within a few years after that, should spend at least two years in the military or three years in some volunteer organization like the Peace Corps or VISTA...

...Since what is needed to bring down the price of housing is new houses, we should allow the mortgage interest deduction only on the purchase of new, additional units...

...They try to give each organized group whatever is needed to keep it happy...

...As a first step toward this kind of democracy, the schools must do a better job of preparing us for the choices we have to make...

...Students needn’t be told what kind of health care system is best-but they should understand the full consequences of our present approach, and of the five or six possible alternatives...

...Certainly Americans weren’t all Albert Schweitzers then, but just as certainly we aren’t all Ebenezer Scrooges now...

...about getting publicity, or that we have a better press agent...

...Jobs and school are all part of the problem, but it is bigger than both of them...

...We do not let them charge whatever they want, or let them tell us what their specialty will be...

...The first is the move of many Americans from small towns to big cities...

...The first source of insecurity hits adults early in their working lives-the soaring cost of buying a house...

...Remember (and we won’t let you forget) that when the Post Office was political, the mail was delivered on time...

...The Service responds that it can’t do anything about your postmaster, because, since it has become new and independent, he is protected by a statute modeled after the civil service l a w s . Your c o n g r e s s m a n t h e n promptly forwards you a copy of the Postal Service’s letter, and puts you on his mailing list-after which you receive (allowing 10 days for delivery) regular copies of the Congressional Record containing his denunciations of postal inefficiency...

...In matters of public policy, the common interest that is sacrificed while the parties slug it out in court is often the national interest...

...As for the perpetrators of victimless crimes-those who take dope or sell their bodies-let’s leave them alone...

...we can’t legislate away people’s need for one-to-one companionship...

...There is, first of all, the question of cost...

...And we need government workers who are political in the sense that they are appointed and fired at will, and who will therefore be eager to make the government work well enough for the voters to reelect the politicians who appointed them...

...by the year 2000 between onethird and one-fourth of its citizens will be over the age of 65...

...Robert M. Kaus and Joseph Nocera...

...A national health service could also be another example of how we can change our attitudes towards work...

...When your company has produced a carcenogenic drug or a defective tire, you don’t recall your product, you call your lawyer...

...So, things are bad in governmentas conservatives are fond of pointing out...

...Universal service can help us overcome all these attitudes...

...But as our attitudes toward altruistic service changed, we believe that kind of paranoia would subside...

...They are the kind of people who have been fascinated with the phenomenon of healing since they were five years old...

...Gifted teachers aspire to be administrators, to win large research grants, to go to conferences...

...Our system of “representative democracy” has swung very far toward representation, and away from democracy, in our generation...

...When The Washington Star recently questioned residents of our nation’s capital about the impact of inflation, a typical response was, “We don’t go to Jamaica on the spur of the moment like we used to...

...To remedy this, and to provide adequate assistance to the poor, all our existing welfare programs could be scrapped and replaced with one program that pays out money to Americans on the basis of one criteria: whether or not they need it...

...It’s time we all gave up our special little angles...

...Yet that’s what we allow the doctors to get away with...

...The training they give the technocrats is valuable, but there is nothing in them that is fundamentally beyond the understanding of students in every American school...

...Instead, retirement separates the old from the day-to-day activities that keep society going-just as our educational system segregates the young...

...There are few aspects of American society that have done more to pull us apart than the adversary system and the attitudes that have grown out of it...

...Instead of giving the student the money, as the GI bill did, the government could guarantee a loan from a private bank...

...People like Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and Joseph Wood Krutch taught classes of 15 to 30 undergrqduates, and looked down their noses at the self-important Ph.D.3 who thought that research and contracting was the name of the game...

...But the General Accounting Office found that 93 per cent of the enlisted personnel who are retiring after 20 years are working in administrative or clerical jobs...

...Then let them look at the facts: 80 per cent of the violent crime in this country is caused by criminals between the ages of 15 and 25...

...Freeze Federal Pay Civil servants are overpaid and overgraded...

...New Blood for The Economy So if we are going to get the economy moving again, we will need people who are willing to break away from old habits, to speak up when they see something wrong, to do what they love and do well, instead of riding out a career escalator at HUD or GM...

...They require radical change...

...Even a decade ago, the ordinary goal of owning your own home wouldn’t have had a special impact on the career choices of most Americans...

...Nobody wants to be the fall guy who gives up his piece of the action while somebody else is cutting himself a better deal...

...for too many kids, the fear of being left behind by their peers in the race for credentials would prevent them from joining...

...Payment could be authorized as a surcharge on the student’s later income taxes...

...The usual argument against this proposal claims that if the tax break is restricted to the original purchasers of shares in a new company, they won’t be able to find anybody to bu’y their stock, because they won’t be able to pass along a tax break...

...Unless we seize control of the health care profession from the doctors, they are going to bankrupt us all...

...Criminals Belong in Jail Regarding crime, the great mass of Americans have long ago expressed their dissatisfaction with the “liberal” and “conservative” positions...

...So, salary increases are given without regard to increases in performance or productivity...

...We were involved in that conflict for over ten years, longer than any war in our history...

...We should recognize all of them...

...Two areas where freedom from cliche is vital, but where, sadly, cliche persists, are ‘crime and national security...

...Today, you pay $1 out of every $12...

...In 1946, out of every $22 you earned, you paid $1 for medical care...

...We need to help students understand that reality...

...clear that the continued demands for That would assure union members wage increases by unions have as much that inflation wouldn’t eat into their to do with inflation as any other single wages, and prevent businesses from factor...

...This seems to be the age in which uncontrollable juices are most likely to flow-the evidence is impressive that after age 40 the impulses to violence decline dramatically...

...Right now, the balance is more like 99 per cent protected to one per cent political, with the one per cent concentrated at the upper levels...

...Our medical system takes these people, and after a few years of exploitation as interns and residents, turns them into their own versions of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich-by robbing the insurance companies blind-to compensate for the hardship they have been through, to give them the $100,000 incomes they feel they deserve...

...The prospect of an institutionalized old age is not something anyone looks forward to, yet today most people must turn to institutions when they can no longer provide for themselves...

...Conservatives must stop equating military spending with military preparedness...

...And it can impress upon us the i m p o r t a n t d i s t i n c t i o n between personal and legislated altruism...

...But he is also saying, in effect, “I can do this bit of good because I’m so well trained, but somebody who is not as smart as me has to do his part by cleaning bedpans...

...That is why at times like this, making excess profits...

...One of the chief objections to a guaranteed annual income is the charge that it will keep people from working...

...Shouldn’t there be dignity enough, and joy, in simply functioning well, in being a good doctor, teacher, or carpenter...

...Poverty has no immediate reality to them...

...For the leaders of each group, those people are merely statistics...

...It has a makebelieve quality...

...But soon a Chile desk officer was interposed in the hierarchy, followed by an assistant secretary for Latin America (with deputy), and then a regional director for the West Coast of Latin America, with his deputy...

...If we saw it as part of our duty to spend time with the old, to do everything from reading to them to cleaning their beds, there would be no need for the widespread institutionalization of the elderly...

...In doing so, we contribute to the divisions that hurt us the most-the divisions between our classes...

...enough to justify retaining civil service protection for half the available federal job slots...

...Too many of us go to the ballet, the symphony, or the art gallery not out of any genuine love of dance, music, or painting, but because it makes us feel refined, cultui-ed-superior to our fellow man...

...But let them also concede to liberals that there is a qualitative difference between violent crime and non-violent crime-the man who responds to the pressures of society by lifting my wallet is a different sort of threat than the man who responds with a knife in my ribs...

...Instead, we have come to the conclusion that the great national problems in the economy, education, health, law-and the process of governing itself-will not yield to incremental solutions...

...But mainly we seek to distinguish ourselves by the prestige of our positions, and the money we make...

...The other advantage of civil service protection is supposed to be incorruptabilityalt hough the G SA scandals have certainly cast doubt on that...

...Yet we have quite obviously fallen out of the habit of altruism...

...He ic‘as assisred in rhe prcyioration qf {his arricle h.1...

...Then there is the case of Gabrielle Ann Scott Elliott...

...This is particularly true at the middle and upper-middle levels, from GS-13 to 15, where salaries range from $30,000 to $47,500 and where responsibilities, despite important sounding job descriptions, seldom equal those of a Safeway manager...

...Sometimes it can be dangerous, as when air traffic controllers recently went on a work stoppage that caused stacking of planes over crowded airports...

...The most tragic example of this isolation was the Vietnam War...

...She passed the South Carolina Bar exam, and began practicing law...

...Some-like the fear of a costly illness-can be reduced by programs discussed later in this article...

...The planning analyst in the Department of Transportation has his counterpart at General Motors...

...Yet stringent state and federal regulation keeps interest rates unnecessarily high and ensures only one thing: that banks will make excessive profits without fear of competition...

...The personal satisfactions aren’t only for the elite...

...Too many of us would buy a Mercedes instead of a Granada, even though we can’t tell the difference...

...We are not getting higher quality service as government employees make more money...

...Education is another area where we have a practical ideal...

...The last time this happened on a nationwide scale was in World War 11, and while the war experience has been overly glorified and sentimentalized, it did have that important benefit...

...Almost always it is bad for the nation...

...Contributing editor Nicholas Lemann discovered one of these models in the Off-Off Broadway theater circuit of New York City...

...One of these is continuity...

...Doctors would come to expect pleasure from functioning, from healing, rather than from memberships in the country club...

...The final incentive to a revitalized system of work would be to dispense status on the basis of accomplishment and service, rather than title or educational level...

...Our ruling class, the people who call the tune in the government and our other major institutions, is a mixture of old rich and new meritocrats...

...if the inspectors general won’t review the performance of the bureaucracy, let the voters do it...

...Bring Us Together Again Adversary System We live, it is often said, in a litigious society, which has produced a virtual explosion in the number of lawyers and law firms-indeed, between 1964 and 1974 enrollment in ABA approved law schools jumped from 56,265 to 110,713...

...Its chances of succeeding would otherwise be slim...

...Nowhere is this process more evident than in the government hierarchy...

...If you bought stock in the 1960s, you know what 15 years of indiscriminate tax reductions for the Wall Street traders in old issues has done to boost the value of your holdings...

...A good example of the effect of this attitude is what has happened to the foreign service...

...The effect is to encourage anybody who wants a house to make an early decision to pursue a stable, renumerative careerin short, to sell out early rather than late...

...In talking with our friends in the public and private bureaucracies, several forms of insecurity always crop up as reasons for clinging to the riskfree life...

...Once we’ve done that, it is easier to see the concrete steps we can take to begin changing those attitudes, and to solve the problems they have created...

...T o t a l federal civilian employment has held steady at around 2.8 million for a decade...

...we can’t legislate away caring...

...Because the idea of volunteering is so foreign to young Americans today, we believe a universal service would have to be compulsory at first...

...That means early retirement for an average lieutenant colonel will cost the taxpayers at least half-a-million dollars, even before the twice-a-year automatic cost of living adjustment...

...And, when it comes time to negotiate labor contracts, it is easier to grant labor demands than to face a strike...

...A second source of insecurity hits later in life, and isn’t such a new phenomenon...

...They do it because of the immense satisfaction they get from acting, and because they live in an environment that gives as much respect to the underpaid actor as to the wellpaid lawyer...

...And with doctors out of the saddle, the system of medicine would be immensely less expensive than the one we’ve got now...

...Early military retirement has been based on an outmoded version of military life where soldiers were exhausted after 20 years of charging over hill and dale on foot or horseback...

...The only alternative, as we head towards the year 2000, is to create a climate where those who are younger and healthier volunteer their help...

...Instead of encouraging both sides in a dispute to think of the common interest, the legal system encourages them to fight it out, assuring each side that it is perfectly acceptable to take a selfish or morally i n d e f e n s i b l e position...

...We will face a monumentally expensive task unless we find a less costly alternative than having the government pay institutions to see to the needs of the aged...

...Give Up Our Special Little Angles At the heart of the politics of selfishness is the fear, already noted, of being labeled a sucker...

...Sometimes this attitude can be maddening...

...It does mean enlisting the judgment, understanding, and common sense of the public on the issues that affect the nation rather than leaving those choices to vaguely accountable legislators, gnd the technicians they employ...

...In reforming our economy, our goal should be to encourage those new organizations, and the traditional means by which they are developed, entrepreneurs hip...

...In the process they might lose their unreal views of each other-views that are usually either too hostile or too sentimental...

...To narrow the gap between the classes and begin the process of bringing community back to our national life, we need a program of universal service to the country...

...America is not at war today, but it is in trouble, and climbing out of trouble means being willing again to make that kind of sacrifice...

...As a result, this platform isn’t organized like other platforms...

...You’re mad as hell, and you write your congressman to say you’re not going to take it anymore...

...Unfortunately, the current popular discontent with government inefficiency is easily swept into the Washington world of make-believe...

...The “better” people can do t h e i r good in pleasant surroundings without any personal contact with the people they are helping...

...Nothing that has happened in the last ten years has caused us to change our mind...

...Under this system, students would pay for college instead of their parents-freeing the latter from the self-martyring duty of coming up with $30,000 to send their girl to Dartmouth...

...Does this mean a return to the spoils system...

...In so doing, he believes he has done his share of good...

...The sterile civics courses so many of us remember prepare students for a system of government that will exclude them...

...They are sincere, or at least most are...

...The result of our emphasis on being over doing is a system that separates title from function, with the titles going to an ever-growing number of administrators, and the actual jobs to a declining proportion of do-ers...

...The prosperity of lawyers, however, has not had an especially beneficial effect on the- rest of us...

...Because of the sucker factor, we do not expect the leadership of the nation’s big unions to when inflation is getting out of hand, sacrifice their unions’ pay raises for the the only sensible and fair response is to sake of the nation’s economy...

...But it has been different-and one period when it was different was at Columbia College in the 1940s, around the time when Jacques Barzun wrote his book Teacher in America...

...Instead, we have tried to sort out what we think is wrong with the direction our country is headed, the way we see ourselves, and the way we act toward each other...

...The statutes don’t encourage the kind of bureaucratby-bureaucrat examination that would point up, not only who’s not doing hisjob, but who has nojob to do...

...Today, with federal deposit insurance, that is no longer the case...

...They can care in the meeting room, say all the right things, work hard all day-but the problems they are supposed to be solving don’t follow them home...

...And they should be prepared to deal with problems we haven’t even heard of yet...

...Let’s suppose, for example, that the national (or state or local) interest requires that a decision be made on whether or not to build a factory in a beautiful meadow...

...They should be helped to see how costs add up in our various programs of income support...

...Early retirement fuels inflation and costs the government billions ($20 billion for federal disability and retirement this year...

...He promptly and efficiently forwards your complaint to the new, independent Postal Service...

...Environmentalists and pro-growth forces would have their say, and so would the vast majority of citizens who felt strongly both ways...

...The purpose would be simply the protection of society-not revenge, or rehabilitation-although rehabilitative efforts should not be stopped...

...The non-expert, the ordinary citizen, has a perspective which the expert can never attain...

...The symbols of snobbery have dominated the seventies...

...Suppose your postmaster spends his time reading his mail, rather than seeing that yours is delivered...

...You can come from a tenement in Brooklyn, or a small farm in Alabama, but if you are editor of the Harvard Law Review the club will open its doors as wide for you-well, almost as wide-as for a Cabot or an Astor...

...all the issues sound boring, and even ninth grade students can sense that the antiseptic flow charts do not reflect the reality of “How a Bill Becomes a Law...

...At the same time, let us show the nonviolent first offender maximum mercy, and allow every chance at probation...

...Our New Romanoffs rule by bribe...

...But we should also keep in mind that early retirement is no favor to anyone, including the early retiree...

...Yet, it is impose strict wage and price controls...

...What they are less likely to emphasize is that things aren’t a lot better in much of the business world...

...We do not believe the system should finance a lifetime of loafingthere should be limits placed on the amount of time a person can receive payments during the years he is capable of working...

...The bank industry provides a classic example...

...The title of the book was important, because it indicated the value that Barzun placed on doing the front-line work of education: teaching...

...All that’s really needed is someone in Chile to write the report, and the Secretary to read it...

...Still, these benefits arc...

...But financial incentives respond to only one of the motivations for seeking creative, satisfying work...

...What’s more, the federal civil service is only the tip of the bureaucratic iceberg...

...Its decisions affect all of our lives, but it is insulated from the hardships associated with our national problems...

...The solution to the health care mess is a national health service that will set both doctor’s fees and their specialties...

...The system currently works to inflate the price of housing by providing a tax deduction for the interest on all home loan mortgages...

...our jobs should be another...

...So now there are at least six layers of titled officials between the secretary and the ambassador who reports to him...

...It’s a way of making the world think we know the difference, or simply letting them know we can afford the difference...

...Today, the education industry is run for the convenience of its administrators and faculty, just as the government is run for the convenience of bureaucrats...

...Caring for the aged is the starkest example of the practical need for altruistic service...

...Discard Our Ideological Labels The idea that there are two great camps of ideology in American politics, one called “conservative” and the other “1iberal”seems to be breaking down with the rise of politicians like Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart...

...And instead of seeing voluntarism as beneficial, they see it as exploitative...

...Instead of hiding behind their lawyers, people might be encouraged to mediate their differences face-toface...

...Finally, the job of ambassador becomes so empty that anybody who accepts the job is almost certainly more interested in being an ambassador than in doing significant work...

...Let them start by conceding the“conservative” point that the first priority in fighting crime is not to rehabilitate criminals but to protect society...

...This plan would provide enough for the recently retired elderly couple, and the mother of five struggling to bring up her family without a father...

...As with the mortgage interest deduction, the key is to tailor the incentives to encourage the sort of investments that are needed...

...Why...

...In the big city, anonymity has replaced community and what has been lost is not only the peer pressure, but the pride and sense of responsibility...

...In our adversary system, we require the developers and the environmentalists to draw up contradictory “impact statements,” and then these two fight it out in court, with an unelected judge deciding on the basis of a procedural irregularity...

...In the small town there was a peer pressure for everyone to do their s h a r e v o l u n t a r i l y t o help t h e community-and there was a great pride and sense of responsibility in doing so...

...What keeps this whole system going is a stubborn resistance to either organizational or individual evaluation...

...A national health service could return doctors to that five-year-old state...

...Unfulfilled human potential is both a personal and social tragedy, and the number of potentially great scientists, artists, and businessmen who are now practicing law in Washington must represent one of the greatest wastes of human capacity in the history of mankind...

...This is a nation dividednot only into special interest groups, but more painfully by taste, class, money, and title...

...And while we cajole, exhort, lure, and push our citizens into taking these risks, we want to do away with whatever legitimate reasons have prevented them from taking them already...

...No Welfare For The Rich Too many people use social security to finance a trip to Florida or buy a second car, or collect unemployment insurance even though they have enough in the bank to spend a month on the Riviera...

...In personal disputes like divorce, a system of m e d i a t i o n would encourage understanding of each other’s position and mutual respect, instead of fostering the bitterness and hatred that grows out of a lengthy court battle for the house, the car and the kids...

...It can restore the pride and sense of responsibility of‘ small town voluntarism...

...Of course investors will buy the stock-if it’s going up...

...Nationwide volunteer help is the most sensible solution...

...The benefits of this plan are obvious: we would no longer have to bribe people to join the military...

...Divorced parents need to have that respect for each other if they are going to raise sane children...

...He’s probably just gotten out of the foreign car that, according to the television commercial, proves he knows the difference between a picture and a painting, in which the radio was tuned to one of those William Pierce clones on National Public Radio, whose tones assure his listeners that they are the most tasteful of them all...

...When the dangerous criminal is locked away, then we can worry about rooting out crime’s causes...

...and why, they want to go to college...

...With only a tenthgrade education, she used false credentials to get into the University of South Carolina Law School, from which she graduated with aboveaverage grades...

...Some basic financial incentives could again be provided in the tax code...

...The District of Columbia municipal government is, by the testimony of practically everyone who knows anything about it, among the most inept in the nation...

...But many of these loopholes, like the capital gains tax break, are a v a i l a b l e indiscriminately to those who invest in old enterprises, as well as those who i n v e s t in new p l a n t s , or new organizations...

...There, a successful, innovative drama industry is run by people who drive cabs and wait on tables to make ends meet...

...The current budget lists over $120 billion worth of what the government calls “tax expenditures”-what others call loopholes...

...All the things that divide us...

...The explosive growth has taken place in state and local governments (which employed 12.5 million people in 1977) and in private companies that do government work...

...There are courses doing exactly these things-but they are only offered at places like the Harvard Business School or the various academies of public management...

...We have all been tortured by inept doctors trying to give injections, while the nurses who give the same shots more skillfully and painlessly must stand meekly by in deference to the power of a white-coat...

...Look For Our Spitfires With military spending as well, we would be better off if we all forgot whether we were liberals or conservatives...

...Instead, we have come to value our jobs more for what is connected with them-salaries that pay us more than our neighbors, titles that make us appear more important, pensions and job protections that shield us from the problems the rest face...

...In 1941 the reverse was true...

...No amount of government scheming will make entrepreneurship-or whistle-blowing, for that matter-as risk-free as a quiet office in the Treasury Department...

...By instilling the spirit of altruism at a young age, universal service could also sustain in us a lifelong commitment to helping each other...

...And, except when we are protecting our particular interests, most of us don’t-whether we are doctors, dockworkers, or voters for Proposition 13...

...Nor would the government have to pay huge sums of money tending to the needs of the elderly or the sick or the poor...

...The bureaucrat at the FCC can see his mirror image over at AT&T...

...Today’s rulers talk with conviction about poverty, about the cost of medical care, about fighting inflation...

...Health care shouldn’t be a luxury-and under such a system it could be practically free for everyone...

...Faced with these facts let them decide that any person between 15 and 25 who commits a violent crime should receive a minimum sentence of ten years...

...The young man from Brooklyn and the farm boy from Alabama really could be in the same PT boat with a Kennedy, and they didn’t have to go to Harvard Law School to get there...

...Though they are distressingly few, there are some models to which we can turn for inspiration...

...Altruism is one kind of personal enrichment...

...Draft Everyone A second important step toward ending the division in America is to bring the classes together again...

...The reason for the stoppage, according to union president John Leydon: the controllers were fed up with the refusal of Fan Am, TWA, and Northwest-Orient to continue to give them free flights overseas...

...Why do we have to feel superior to others...

...This magazine was founded in 1969 out of a belief that something was going wrong with the American system, that our government wasn’t working anymore...

...The lobbies run the government, but they are only a reflection of those deeper divisions...

...There was a time when bank regulation made sense-banks had been failing around the time of the Depression, and it was clear that the government had to step in to prevent depositors from losing their assets in case of a bank failure...

...But let’s deal with two of them now...

...We need our limited law enforcement resources elsewhere...

...The Treasury Department recently estimated that $51 million worth of tax deductions for unemployment compensation went to people who had incomes of $50,000 or more...

...Today the conservatives are blindly pro-military, and the liberals, just as blindly, are anti...

...True democracy doesn’t mean that all the people must be absorbed all the time by public affairs...

...Here are some obvious places to start: Draft the Doctors Too No one in America has a better angle than the doctors...

...They’re for it now, when it’s the weapon of the past...

...For example, t h e Consolidated Rail Corporation, which lost $387 million last year, gave salary increases to 56 of its top officers and paid them nearly $5 million in bonuses and perquisites...

...Universal service would insure that people from both sides of the track would meet and t a l k and work together...

...so we are paying a good deal of tax rnoney for people who are doing a good deal less work than they could...

...Retirement doesn’t free us, it robs us-of our vitality, of our sense of worth, of our reasons for getting out of bed in the morning...

...Never mind that the cost is passed on to the consumers, that the ones who get squeezed a r e t h e marginally employable, the unorganized...

...If it wasn’t, you could fire the postmaster...

...This plan could be phased in with decent regard for the expectations that have been aroused in older people who have been falsely told by the government that social security is an insurance program, and who have made their retirement plans in the expectation that they will receive this money regardless of their other income...

...How could our ruling class stand to see men dying for so long...

...That figure is about half of the total amount collected by all federal individual and corporate income taxes put together...

...Service in an organization modeled on the old Civilian Conservation Corps could be another option...

...Think for a moment of our other life-protecting servicesthe military, the fire department and the police...

...We mean that our society is a system of related habits, needs, and expectationsand that without dramatically altering those expectations it will be impossible to jog us out of our complacent niches, to force us to ask ourselves what we really want, to allow us to recognize what we have in common, and to inspire the sort of individual and collective effort that might achieve those mutual goals...

...Most officers who retire around the age of 40 as lieutenant colonels live into their seventies and eighties...

...There are a lot of reasons for this, but three stand out as particularly crucial...

...The other half should be filled with political appointees...

...Work During The Golden Years Too many people, especially in the government, retire before they need to...

...When she was caught, The Washington Post ran an outraged expose-to think t h a t someone without true credentials would presume to serve the public’s legal needs...

...Some of us value celebrity, and think we’re better than others simply because ’ we’re better, known-which usually just means we are more concerned Charles Perers is etliror-in-chief of The Washington Monthly...

...But, of course, they have to add something to every report to justify their titles, and in the process reports become so boring and devoid of meaning that the Secretary stops reading them-which demoralizes the junior foreign service officers, who take to spending more of their time at lunch, so the original drafts of the report are no longer any good either...

...Both the statistics and common humanity say give him another chance...

...A third reason is the trickle-down theory of altruism.The highly-trained lawyer who works as a legislative aide to Senator Edmund Muskie, for example, channels all his altruistic impulses into his job...

...Liberals must realize the need for an effective military force, and the need to prevent the cry of “No More Vietnams” from precluding the sensible use of that force...

...A few top jobs and a few at the bottom should be excluded-but on the whole this would be sensible management...

...However, we also see our plan as giving the average man the main advantages of the sabbaticala chance at reasonable intervals in his life to catch his breath, to consider where he is going, to change direction...

...Even after passage of the recent civil service reform act it is extremely difficult and time-consuming to fire lazy, indifferent, or incompetent employees...

...The solution is to use our tax system...

...There have been periods in our history-again World War 11 is a good example-when we have been willing to sacrifice for the national interest...

...We should all concentrate on finding the weapons that are to us what the Spitfire was to Britain in World War 11-not the costliest or fanciest weapon, but a weapon that did the job when it was needed...