political Booknotes
Korb, Alasdair Roberts, Martin Walker,Suzannah Lessard,Lewis Wofolson,David Reich,Lawrence J.
Political Booknotes Great Expectations By Alasdair Roberts IN 1992, DAVID OSBORNE AND TED Gaebler wrote a book called Reinventing Government, which pushed the usually-dull subject...
...While there may be more detail than you want for bedside reading, sound reporting and lucid writing keep it readable...
...Readers inclined to dismiss “soft” liberal complaints that free markets lead to inequality of wealth or individualistic consumerism will have a hard time brushing Kuttner off...
...Igor Korchilov, slightly older, was working as a cinema projectionist in 1959 when a Georgian folk singer brought back from a foreign tour an Elvis Presley record...
...Grigory Yavlinski, the Russian economist who had been working on the details of such a Grand Bargain at Harvard, also gets some of the blame, for warning the western governments that Gorbachev’s economic reforins were half-measures...
...Setting a Linit on Markets By David Reich BEWARE THOSE MARKET loving politicians, with their hands-off approach to economic policy...
...The administration is working on a similar, smaller-scale proposal...
...MARTIN WALKER is U.S...
...He offers Mikhail and Raisa Gorliachev holding hands in the back seat of liinousines, Gorby scaring the daylights out of George Bush in a wild golf cart ride at Camp David, and the final Bush-Gorby haggle in a cramped elevator in which Gorby secured mostfavorednation trade status for Russia...
...But it would be better if Gottlieb more explicitly acknowledged two things: First, during the Cold War the militaryindustrial complex had some real successes...
...but since the imperfections of the market mean that someone else must pick up the tab for those patients who’ve been ditched, there is no net gain for society as a whole...
...The closest the authors get to a case study-and for it they rely on a chapter by Jeremy Resnick-is a case study of the Turner School in Wilkensburg, Pa...
...Into the usual inlx of waltzes and polkas he dropped “Blue Suede Shoes” and ‘Jailhouse Rock...
...Both parties implemented radical reforms despite “howls of protest” against them...
...Libertarians love sweeping generalizations that too often founder on the rocks of reality...
...Many had been trained by Russian CinigrC scholars, and it showed...
...The fact is, America does watch the debate, and that makes the politicians squirm...
...Harvey Mansfield, Burke scholar and neo-conservative guru, ordinarily writes in a sober style...
...Millions of lives and billions of dollars in the balance...
...burean chief for Britain's The Guardian...
...Elected officials and agencies also resist demands to make performance data public...
...And while Kuttner probably goes further in his rejection of laissez-faire capitalism than can be justified by his evidence, he makes an important contribution in his new book by discrediting the rhetoric of the laissez-faire policy makers...
...The authors also make overstated claims about the impact of Britain’s “Next Steps Initiative” (NSI), under which most of the British civil service has been transformed into a set of special quasi-independent service agencies...
...In Mirage, Hager and Pianin, reporters for Congressional Quarterly and The Washington Post respectively, dramatize how this combination of ideological zeal and the voters' mixed message has shaped the last three presidents' varying approaches to mountuing deficits...
...As the health insurance debate heats up again, the medicine might go down more easily by fitting Medicare into a national health plan...
...Does he not know the Coast Guard is part of the Transportation Department...
...Mirage is also a story about Washington’s incestuousness...
...What Kuttner’s provocative book does do is to make a highly intelligent economic argument for the necessity of regulating economic activity when the market really does behave perversely...
...Because reform debates in the US...
...Government agencies, they say, do not exist to serve their employees...
...Osborne and Plastrik make dramatic claims about the capacity of reinvention to make government “work better and cost less...
...Furthermore, the government’s statistics don’t include part-time employees-who have tripled in number since 1979...
...Osborne based this estimate on his understanding of what the British had accomplished...
...And the boomers should not take for granted what Medicare and Social Security have done to ease caring for aging mothers and fatherswithout breaking the bank at home...
...However most of this reduction came from privatization of governinent-owned industries, rather than downsizing of governiiient dcnartments...
...How did this happen...
...Replacement: None...
...Is this fair, given that Mulroney was struggling to manage a constitutional crisis that threatened to break up the country, and that privatization might have alienated allies in the constitutional struggle...
...The authors call this “the biggest and best such package since the deficit went out of control in the mid 1970s...
...LEWIS WOLFSON is a professor of communication at American university, and director of the Dialogue with the Press Program...
...Sheldon Wolin gives us a difficult but stimulating essay on “The Destructive Sixties and Post Modern Conservativism...
...He advocates subsidies for key industries, reminiscent of the aggressive trade policies of his colleague and co-founder of The American Prospect, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich...
...Would even a trace of these programs remain...
...Indeed, the authors could have underscored even more strongly the fact that balancing the budget does not necessarily lead to a smooth-running economy...
...Hager and Pianin feel that Reagan made balancing the budget impossible...
...This is true, of course...
...And while eight deficit-cutting plans over 15 years have helped, the unhappy eyefact is that the first 15 cents of every federal budget dollar goes to interest on the national debt...
...Will proposals to eliminate “red tape” within government agencies, or to expand contractingout, jeopardize these goals...
...In Kuttner’s America, the basic assumption would be that regulation is good for the country’s economic health, and that it should be carried out when needed without the kinds of subterfuges to which politicians often currently resort...
...Times have changed, we see, reading these essays...
...Nor, it seems, had its full tenor been passed on to Gorbachev, who was huiniliated in London when the Japanese prime minister coldly dismissed as inadequate Gorbachev’s promise of freeing 70 percent of Soviet prices by the end of the year...
...Another difficulty is that reforms aimed at setting up arm’s-length relationships don’t work as flawlessly as Osborne and Plastrik suggest...
...Most memoirs hy officials give hlinkered accounts of the bits of history they were privileged to see...
...Palazchenko delivers a discreet but powerful analysis of the West’s historic failure of imagination and political courage in grasping the opportunity Gorbachev embodied...
...As I watched the unraveling of Yugoslavia, I had to admit that all major powers, including the United States, Germany and Russia, acted not so much for the sake of peace but more in order to test their strength in a new regional balance of forces and to advance their perceived interests...
...Their books, as well as their careers, suggest that the difference between being a Beatles and an Elvis fan is not just a matter of timing...
...Thus, leveraged buyouts contributed to the effciencyand productivity-oriented business environment of the 1990s, a benefit which more than outweighed the negative effects to particular companies...
...He identifies suspicion of state power as one of the legacies of that time...
...The Elvis-loving Korchilov is a meatandpotatoes guy, hard-working, aiid conscientious...
...And while a democratic spirit and a deference to publicly minded regulators may no longer be inconsistent, Kuttner does not give substantial evidence to prove that de Tocqueville‘s old interpretation does not remain the proper one...
...We may not be in a golden era of social idealism, but the time when belief in liberal values was as blood to sharks has passed...
...He would place no restrictions on the number of hours employees can be required to work...
...But change is in the air...
...In contrast, Martha Nussbaum, erstwhile student of Mansfield, now on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law school, builds a case for sixties feminism with a care so extreme, arguing for the liberal essence of the movement so thoroughly, that by the end we also have a strong sense of the big bad wolfMansfield, perhaps-that she expects is going to come and try to blow her house down...
...Everyone knows it’s just a game.’ And the press often takes a ‘Haven’twebeen-here-before’ tone when it could help cut through the rhetoric with truth boxes similar to those used to analyze the claims in political ads...
...According to Sanford Gottlieb‘s new book, the cause is, “defense addiction!’ The addiction, he explains, developed as a result of the Cold War and the undue influence of what President Eisen-hower called the military-industrial complex...
...It subverts “rational analysis,” and allows narrow interests to undermine the public interest...
...The first is that they may erode popular control over the bureaucracy...
...Whether or not he is right is now immaterial...
...Here’s another illustration...
...The authors also could have been bolder in exploring ways to ease tensions over Medicare and Social Security rather than just carrying the torch for the baby boomers...
...So one can deny that govcrnincnt needs to bc macle more flexible and service-oriented...
...But once in the White House, Reagan did not have “the stomach” for deep cuts in federal programs...
...Since someone (in many cases the hospital) will always foot the bill, there are few incentives for doctors, hospitals, and insurance providers to compete on the basis of price...
...For example, Osborne and Plastrik endorse British reform called the Competing for Quality Initiative (CQI), which dramatically expanded contracting out...
...For example, Osborne and Plastrik chastise former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney for his indifference to reinvention, and his willingness to cave in to “special interests” who opposed privatization and contractingout...
...The process of negotiating annual agreements is time-consuming...
...Otherwise, this collection of essays pro and con the left-wing movement of the ’60s is disparate, and, generally of an academic bent that does not make for easy reading...
...Tthe gist of his attempt is to find general connections between the ’60s left and present right such as the similarity of rightwing feelings about Johnson, or the way "the self-righteousness of feminists is surely not greater than the selfrighteousness of antifeminists...
...The authors draw heavily on the experience of the United Kingdom and New Zealand, which have agressively applied the principles of reinvention...
...Gottlieb demonstrates how, even after the Cold War, defense contractors have worked hand-in-hand with the Pentagon and Congress to create an environment that inflates not only the threats to our national security, but also the potential damage to communities that might lose the economic benefits of defense facilities and contracts...
...Giddy with ascendancy, he fails to censor a regrettable penchant, hitherto undetected, for bizarre little Buckley-esque affections-conveying that, with the wind at his back, he knows he can get away with anything...
...The first problem is overselling what reimrntion can nctually accomplish...
...Bush drove a series of hard bargains, and as a result, Palazchenko says: ‘At some point in 1991 the perception of ‘Gorbachev inaking all the concessions’ became a negative Factor for hi i n domestical ly...
...He suggests adopting a policy of “cooperative security” which would make use of multilateral interventions and international treaties to enable us to reduce our military and nuclear forces to defensive capabilities Defense companies rendered superfluous by this shift would convert to civilian industries...
...They tried to bluff Clinton by sending him a continuing resolution to keep government operating that included a higher Medicare premium...
...Reinventing Public Education by Paul 7: Hill, Lawrence C. Pierce, and Vance W Cuthrie Chicago, $16 This examination of the case for contracting out the operation of public schools is impressive in every way but one: It does not look at the evidence of what has happened to the quality of education in the many schools that are now being run under contract...
...If the reinvention movement is to thrive, we need a more candid appraisal of its potential and its limitations...
...HMOs cut costs by dismissing doctors who tend to offer expensive treatment, and by restricting patient access to expensive care except when absolutely necessary...
...But though the essays by a variety of authors on both the left and right appear to have been written as recently as possible given publishing schedules, they are already out of sync with the times in subtle ways...
...Palazchenko concludes, ‘‘I feel now, as I did then, that in the late 1980s the West and the Soviet Union had a unique opportunity to build new international relations and to ensure a relatively manageable transition from a bi-polar world based on superpower confrontation to a niultipolar world of the future...
...The cinema became a dance hall on Saturday nights, and Korchilov was the DJ...
...It was the West as a whole which refused to rally to Gorbachev’s last appeal, and that palpable failure of Gorbachev’s fabled marketing skills led directly to the Moscow coup later in the summer...
...Most of the right-wing contributions here strike me as predictable screeds on how the ’60s were bad...
...He sets out to level all the tenets of liberal and radical reform with the grandiose glibness of one who knows his opponents are in a desperately weakened state...
...SUZANNAH LESSARD is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...The most valuable part of the book is Gottlieb‘s discussion of how to break the addiction...
...But here the cresting of the right beneath him has intoxicated him...
...By acts of bravery and skill and perseverance, acts that have not lost their power to take one’s breath away, the legal edifice of racial injustice was dismantled...
...Politicians took an active interest in making government leaner, more innovative, and customer-friendly...
...Politics, the authors imply, messes up good government...
...Again, they use Britain’s Conservative government, and New Zealand’s Labour government as models...
...Without it, the Kremlin would have gone without its two toplevel interpreters...
...Palazchenko at least has the consolation of his favorite music: “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one...
...George “No New Taxes” Bush was finally forced to raise them in his 1990 budget...
...An interpreter like Palazchenko naturally stresses the moments he witnessedthose involving English speakers like Rajiv Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, and John Major...
...So just what sort of regulation does Kuttner approve of...
...He would also abolish Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare...
...Without any superpower threatening us, the Pentagon is still spending at its peacetime cold war levels, and Bill Clinton’s first defense budget was higher, even in inflation-adjusted dollars, than Richard Nixon’s last...
...He identifies the great flaw in the movement: the rejection of technological progress, the kind of progress that creates the expansive economic environment in which the reforms espoused in the ’60s can be implemented...
...They picture the boomers as saddled with the burden of supporting programs that the authors feel ‘have “calcified into the most unshakable features of the American social compact...
...Osborne and Plastrik never really address the question...
...This gives a curiously old-fashioned flavor to a book which treats Britain as a major power, rather than as a tangential player it was in the cold war’s end game...
...In case after case, Kuttner shows how naive support of a free-market orthodoxy that does not consider the imperfect conditions in which deregulation is applied or the subtle ways it can fail, has lead to distortions in markets such as health care, labor, electric power, telephone service, and even finance-with huge losses in economic and social welfare...
...In 1994-95, for example, the agencies are said to have decreased operating costs by about five percent...
...As Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, Budget Director Dick Darman, and abrasive Chief of Staff John Sununu would enter the room, Dole would mutter under his breath, “Here come Nick, Dick-and Prick!’ Mirage shows that throughout history we have endowed a balanced budget with near spiritual significance...
...And some of Gottlieb‘s heroes are even Republicanslike John Kasich, chairman of the House Budget Committee, who stopped production of the B-2 bomber and has attempted to reduce the overall level of defense expenditures...
...The Holy Grail by Lewis Wolfson WHAT AN EPIC: READ IT AND weep, Leo Tolstoy...
...Kuttner also fails to sell the reader on his social views...
...Flashback By Suzannah Lessard THIS BOOK CONTAINS A NUMBER of somewhat disparate but stimulating insights into the '60s...
...And he backs up his claim with hard-headed economic arguments...
...In fact, 15vIinski had heen part of a pre-summit Soviet delegation to the White House with Yevgeny Priinakov (now Yeltsin’s foreign minister), at which Bush and his NSC advisor (the late Ed Hewett) had warned the Russians that no Marshall Plan was in prospect...
...The !ate House Speaker Thomas “Tip” ONeil’s efforts to save 8,000 defense jobs for Raytheon is just one example...
...The crowd went wild, Korchilov was threatened with the sack, decided to teach himself English, and within the year had won admission to Moscow's prestigious Foreign Languages Institute...
...Second, economic conversion policy is a strong, growing economy that provides jobs to displaced defense workers...
...But there is much that is compelling in Palazchenko’s devastatingly judicious critique of the Bush administration, whose policies helped push Mikhail Gorbachev out of office while keeping Saddam Hussein in power...
...They scared the daylights out of many of us...
...Contracting out offers a tantalizing escape for schools burdened with too many inept administrators and teachers to present any realistic hope for improvement from within...
...Why can’t our leaders poke under the hood, as Ross Perot has said, and fix this budget business...
...You can count on his book for the guest lists and the menus, the clothes people wore and some delicious nuggets about the way the powerful act in private...
...De Tocqueville thought that America’s democratic spirit was a result of its freedom from government-coordinated regulation, the very sort of regulation which he believed was hobbling the democratic spirit of his native France...
...Mirage's message to Perot and pals is that balancing the budget is not just a simplistic accounting problem the political co ards and lunkheads in Washington refuse to face...
...ALASDAIR ROBERTS is a visiting associate professor at the University of Southern California Washington Center...
...New Zealanders got so frustrated that they overhauled their electoral system in 1993...
...But Kuttner demonstrates that national wealth can actually be damaged by unrestrained capitalism...
...DAVID REICH is at Oxford University...
...Had Gorbachev stayed in power, he suggests, the Soviet Union could have survived as a loose confederation undergoing a more orderly economic reform, and avoiding the wars of the Soviet succession which have ravaged Georgia, Armenia, Tadjikistan, Moldova, and Yugoslavia...
...There are two difficulties with reforms such as these...
...The free-marketeer’s solution to these cost over-runs is Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) -which currently serve over 55 million Americans...
...It argues that governments should abandon nonessential functions...
...On occasion, however, Kuttner believes regulation should also be driven by forces beyond those of the market, as in the case of health care...
...It also reveals, unintentionally, the fickleness of the current political zeitgeist, for the context in which the '60s are reassessed here is clearly that of the recent rise of the right...
...But government agencies may have an obligation to treat workers fairly and equitably...
...Kuttner advocates a process of “iterative” regulation, in which regulatory policies are evaluated and reevaluated until they’re made effectivea process that would rely on high-minded public servants who carry out their work within designated parameters and according to a generally good regulatory ethic...
...It’s tough to criticize any book that aims at improving the way government works...
...spent about $4 trillion ($12.8 trillion in 1995 dollars) on defense...
...It was, of course, the world that went away, that old cold war way of doing things which ended with such decency and minimal bloodshed as Gorbachev and Shevardnadze defanged the beast...
...He also says he would abolish the Department of Transportation except for the function of "maintenance of the interstate highway system...
...One of the unfortunate features of parliamentary systems like those in Britain and New Zealand is that prime ministers can win strong legislative majorities without having the support of a majority of voters...
...Thus, Murray says he favors abolishing the Department of Commerce and replacing none of its activities except “restrictions on the export of military technology...
...Year after year, our leaders fight over what combination of cuts in spending on government programs, and taxes to pay for those programs, can keep the country from falling deeper into debt...
...We the voters are also responsible...
...Many observers complain that it has eroded legislative control over agencies...
...It’s a mistake to hold up these two governments as models for American politicians...
...But from the more intellectually advenhirous and far inore intriguing Beatles fan, we get some extraordinary insights and real food for thought in what should become an essential source for future historians...
...What the zealots did not understand is that Americans are nervous about leaders who get too far out in front of them-especially a bunch of green GOP legislators...
...Again, this was a failure of the incoming Bush administration, which spent much of its first year on an agonizing policy review about dealing with Gorbachev...
...By and large, this regulation can rely on market mechanismsfor example Kuttner approves of the markets that have been created in the Midwest which allow companies to trade vouchers for the right to pollute...
...But then came the grand-daddy of all budget confrontations...
...It has proved difficult to craft agreements that cover all the dimensions of behavior that elected officials care about...
...Many rules that govern the use of human resources in government are adopted to ensure fair treatment of workers and to provide equal opportunities for certain kinds of workers...
...Ronald Reagan did a full pirouette...
...However, some of the regulations Kuttner proposes can have unintended, negative consequences...
...Osborne's new book, co-authored with Peter Plastrik, develops similar themes...
...But, Kuttner goes on to describe how HMOs also devote a great deal of effort to promoting strategies that have little social benefit-such as shedding the least profitable patients from their insurance rolls...
...But that big bad wolf isn’t around anymore, at least not in the triumphant, untrammeled form that her defensiveness projects...
...It is but a confrontation which has been transformed by Republican ideologues into “a grueling battle to the political death” over national goals and the role government should play in our lives...
...The British reform is not, as the authors suggest, “widely viewed as a resounding success...
...This is a good book...
...The resulting efficiency will be reflected in lower prices...
...A third problem with the book is the authors’ distaste for everyday politics...
...history...
...Hooked on Hardware By Lawrence J. Korb IF YOU STILL HAVE ANY ILLUSIONS about the “peace dividend” yielded by the end of the Cold Wx, consider these figures: From 1947 to 1990 the US...
...Clearly, the impulse behind Yeltsin’s decisions on Yugoslavia was, at least in part, the desire to act unlike Gorbachev-more decisively, accentuated by a rather sympathetic attitude toward separatism...
...It can be debated whether the West’s real interest lay in modernizing and democratizing a shrunken Soviet Union, shorn of its Baltic states, or in seeing the old enemy suffer the kind of political gangrene which has left us with the semi-failed state of today’s Russia...
...study of how Washington really works...
...And there is now enough evidence from schools run by outfits such as the Nashville Alternative public schools-and by other organizations in places as diverse as Chelsea, Mass., and Pasadena, Tex.-for an intelligent reporter reasonably sophisticated about education to write a truly important work about the experience to date, a book with enough life to give flesh to the statistics on performance that are emerging and to let us know whether contracting out really is more than just a promising idea...
...The Economist reported last June that the actual savings may only be a third of what the government said...
...So, what’s the big deal anyway...
...In the seven years since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the United States has shelled out another $2 trillion...
...Native English speakers could always pick up a hint of Merseyside in his translations...
...He also said that he would not balance the budget “on the backs of the American people” by raising taxes, and then did it “over and over again”-signing “the largest tax increase in modern US...
...Unfortunately, there isn’t always solid evidence to support those claims...
...The GOP hard-liners forced everyone to face the cost of entitlements and proposed an enormous cut in projected spending on Medicare- 270 billion dollars over seven years...
...The feeling grows that despite the pessimism and continuing jockeying, a plan for balancing the budget will be set this year...
...Whatever one thinks of the other consequences of the decade, the decade is redeemed by what was done in bus terminals, at lunch counters, in voter registration drives on ramshackle porches along dangerous back roads...
...The debate over balancing the budget has made an election look like a walk in the park...
...One of Palazchenko’s favorite Beatles’ songs was “Girl,” and much of this book seems to have been written with those lines at the back of his mind: “Is there anybody wants to listen to my story / All about the girl that went away...
...The complaint may be exaggerated, but it deserves to be taken seriously...
...Kuttner explains how the inherent flaw in this particular market is the consensusamong conservatives and liberals alike-that everyone should have access to medical treatment during an emergency...
...By the time Gorbachev had decided he was prepared to accept all the consequences of democratic reforms that were beginning to shake up the country, of all the Western leaders, it seemed then that only Margaret Thatcher fully believed him,” Palazchenko notes of their meeting in April, 1989...
...Palazchenko was not there to interpret, so that crucial prior warning seeins never to have crossed his radar screen...
...He dreams of an America that is very different in civic virtue and communal spirit from the one we have now...
...But such a climate can too easily lead down a slippery slope to inefficiency and skewed incentives, not to speak of damage to America’s political fiber through a weakening of the nation’s democratic spirit...
...This may be good for an individual HMO...
...The package worked and, with a boost from the economy, the deficit fell for the next three years...
...This year the drive to pass a constitutional amendment to balance the budget failed again, even as Cassandras warn that if this madness of deficit spending continues, our children and grandchildren will be selling matches, or maybe used computers, on street corners...
...I hose officials have an obvious incentive to put their reforms in the best possible light...
...This points to an important lesson that Kuttner ignores: Markets, more than regulators, tend to be self-correcting, and we should never lose sight of the fact that America has done passably well in the last 20 years as many regulations have been lifted...
...It’s a pleasant effect...
...Only Todd Gitlin’s final essay works assiduously to find relationships...
...The authors also say that reintvention has allowed the British government to reduce its civil service by one-third since 1979 “with few layoffs...
...To succeed, the East and West needed to cooperate not only on arins control and regional issues, but also in helping the Soviet Union modernize its political and economic systems...
...iMaybe another key value-keeping the country together-had to trump operational efficiency, at least in the short term...
...This dewy-eyed account of the deeper failure of the Bush-Gorbachev years passes lightly over the disasters in Nagorno-Karabakh and the Baltics which contributed to Bush‘s skepticism...
...In both countries, large parts of the bureaucracy have been set up as agencies that work at arm’s-length from elected officials...
...Most profits come not from increasing efficiency and weighing costs against benefits, but from offering expensive services...
...Palazchenko’s book frequently drifts into an essay of might-havebeens...
...In his citation of Alexis de Tocqueville, Kutmer inadvertently underscores this point...
...Wh en the changes in the Soviet Union began, most Sovietologists were not ready...
...But does budget-balancing have to be high noon between boomers and the AARF’ battalions...
...Therefore, instead of allowing HMOs to waste resources on risk assessments and marketing (at least a 15 percent overhead, according to Kuttner), the government should concentrate on keeping costs down within a legislated framework of universal health insurance...
...In his regrettably short foreword, Will identifies a sense of limitlessness as characteristic of both the ’60s establishment and its challengers: the idea that “The United States could fight a war, and engage in ‘nation building’ in the nation where the war was being fought, and build a Great Society at home, simultaneously” while the counterculture sought to confront, transcend, and abolish all social restrictions...
...He also calls for regulation that is responsive and specific to a particular industry’s needs and that makes the market work more smoothly and conform to social goals...
...Much of Banishing Bureaucracy aims at finding ways of getting politics out of government...
...Conversely, we have had numerous years in the last two decades when the deficit was high, but the economy kept humming along...
...President Clinton also comes under fire for building unnecessary weapons systems like the Seawolf submarine...
...Hager and Pianin’s portrait has enough inside stuff to keep political junkies happy...
...Osborne recently argued that the Clinton administration should adopt a version of the Next Steps Initiative, under which most of the bureaucracy would be turned into a series of relatively independent “performancebased organizations...
...In 1994-95, total agency spending actually grew by about 4 percent...
...So investment, labor, and raw materials will be directed to the sectors in which they can be best and most profitably used...
...No one can deny that governments need to focus more on essential functions, put more emphasis on results, and look for innovative ways of getting work done...
...Major’s government, for example, delayed releasing performance data for 1996, because of concern among ministers about a proposal to publicly identify low-performing agencies...
...Will is the most interesting writer on the right in this collection because he is able to acknowledge the positive aspects of the other side...
...Osborne and Plastrik call on elected officials to have the “courage” to deal firmly with opponents of reinvention...
...But the wind isn’t at his back any more, at least not in the way it was, and his giddiness consequently appears to be just that...
...Like most libertarians, Murray’s never met a fact he couldn’t ignore...
...Here’s what he says: "Remembering elements: None...
...However, an internal evaluation concluded that the government’s claim was misleading, because it excluded the cost of administering the contractingout program...
...To bolster his case Gottlieb provides a number of examples of companies that retained their employees by selling to civilian government agencies and entering the commercial marketplace...
...Deep down we know that what we don’t know about the budget deficit could hurt us and our children...
...Bill Clinton came out smelling like a rose after a near humiliation in his 1993 tax and spending fight...
...The disagreement deepened and the admiration disappeared with the case for black inferiority that Murray and his co-author, Richard J. Herrnstein, made in The Bell Crime...
...Otherwise, elected officials are supposed to leave the agencies alone...
...One way to do this is to remove much of the operations of government from day-to-day control of elected officials...
...What is important, from this figure who traveled and conferred with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, is further evidence that this almost utopian sensibility had gripped the Kremlin, as if all of them were singing along to Palazchenko’s constant humming of the John Lennon song “Imagine...
...Gitlin does good work in teasing apart the contradictory ideals of personal freedom and social justice that makes the “movement” confusing even in retrospect...
...Take Bob Dole’s wisecracks during the Bush budget talks...
...But Bush virtually disowned it, groveling to GOP conservatives who never forgave him...
...The entire government held hostage...
...This has made the voter a more formidable player in budget talks...
...Pavel Palzchenko, familiar from TV as the bald one with the mustache, fell in love with the English language through the Beatles in the 1960s...
...But over-simplifying the argument for reform -overstating benefits, minimizing problems, and overlooking tradeoffs-creates fertile ground for skepticism and disillusionment...
...Take the case of health care...
...Each agency negotiates an annual agreement that specifies exactly what it will produce...
...We in Washington say that most Americans take the political brawls and overblown rhetoric with a grain of salt...
...can be influenced by our understanding of what has worked elsewhere...
...By the time that the review process was complete, providing the usual lowest-common-denominator boilerplate that bureaucracies tend to concoct, the collapsing Berlin Wall was changing everything...
...Although this is not new news, Gottlieb provides plenty of useful illustrations of the phenomenon...
...Unfortunately, it is equally unpersuasive...
...We want it both ways-cut the budget, eliminate the deficits, but don’t lay a hand on my job or benefit checks or favorite government services...
...In addition to Bush, Palazchenko blames Britain’s John Major and Japan’s Kaifu for the wet blankets they threw over Gorbachev’s hopes of a Grand Bargain at the London G-7 summit...
...Political Booknotes Great Expectations By Alasdair Roberts IN 1992, DAVID OSBORNE AND TED Gaebler wrote a book called Reinventing Government, which pushed the usually-dull subject of bureaucratic reform high on the popular agenda...
...Advocates of this approach maintain that in a free market, companies that can use resources to generate the highest profit will offer the highest prices for them...
...Does Murray even know it's in Commerce...
...Bush did not even try to secondguess his own Sovietologists, whoin Palazchenko, with some justice, condemns as “tending to be instinctively anti-Soviet and some even anti-Russian...
...This time, give the politicians and the press credit for dragging themselves, and us, toward a solution...
...How can such regulation be prevented from damaging the economy...
...This iterative regulation, of course, would require oversight and political control to root out bad regulatory agencies that have become overfriendly with the very industries they are supposed to regulate...
...We need to wrestle with entitlements and recognize that sacrifice is also part of our system of government...
...They say these new agencies have reduced their budgets substantially without eroding service quality...
...The kindest thing that can be said for Murray’s latest effort, What it Merrns to be a Libei-tarian, is that it is not as offensive as was The Bell Ciwve...
...Will this obligation be jeopardized by aggressive reinvention...
...As George Will points out, “Politically the decade invigorated the right, not the left” but the triumphant conservatives “seem aggrieved because politics seems peripheral to, and largely impotent against, cultural forces and institutions permeated with what conservatives consider the ’60s sensibilities...
...How often in Gorbachev’s circle they must retell the dreadful tale of the last generalsecretary going into his Kremlin office for the last, dignified day, to find a drunken Yeltsin and his cronies emptying a bottle of scotch at the scene of their triumph...
...This is one of the main reasons why Osborne and Plastrik are advocates of Britain’s Next Steps Initiative, and similar reforms undertaken in New Zealand...
...Another way to minimize the influence of politics is to bulldoze through it...
...Back in the USSR by Martin Walker SOMEBODY OUGHT TO TELL Cleveland's Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame about the role of pop music in orchestrating the end of the cold war...
...Washington knows it too...
...Unfortunately, their hubris in shutting down the government frightened us...
...Of course, not everyone’s a villain...
...LAWRENCE J. KORB is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution...
...But there are often contending values at stake, and elected officials may reasonably decide that a little inefficiency has to be tolerated for a larger good...
...Why should we care whether Osborne and Plastrik get these facts right...
...The examination follows the school right up to the opening of its doors but stops there-even though the school has been open for almost two years...
...Osborne said his proposal would save $24 billion by 2004-enough to pay for a battery of new education and training programs...
...These governments weren’t just fighting “special interests”: they were fighting much of the voting public...
...By continually reassuring voters that there were easy fixes [for the budget], he cheapened the discourse and undermined support for politicians-his own budget director among them-who knew how painful the real cuts had to be and desperately needed public support to get them enacted...
...What it Means to be a Libertarian by Charles Murray Broadway Books, $20 We admired Murray’s first book, Losing Grozind, although we disagreed with some of its implications...
...For instance, Kuttner argues that it would have been good to moderate the leveragedbuyout craze of the later 1980s because several companies were damaged by predatory practices...
...But there are now many mainstream economists who see the craze as having had a good effect on the economy, forcing the management teams of other companies to stay on their toes for fear that they, too, would be bought out...
...They repeat the government’s assertion that CQI reduced the cost of some activities by 21 percent...
...A pity, therefore, that Palazchenko bases so much of his argument on that moment when Gorbachev offered the Grand Bargain of structural economic reform in return for a modern version of the Marshall Plan to help the Soviet Union survive the process...
...Again, the authors rely on an exaggerated statistic: in fact, a 1996 report shows that agency spending has generally increased over time...
...The Microsoft case, and others like it, inspire some confidence in the officials who are responsible for the regulatory machinery...
...Of course, it’s important to root out government waste and find cheaper ways of doing business...
...The declared ambition to make connections between the two points of view is not fulfilled...
...The Republican ideologues’ budget alarms got our attention...
...To this extent, HMOs support the claim that giving markets free rein maximizes efficiency for society as a whole...
...A second difficulty with Banishing Bureaumay is its unrelenting emphasis on efficiency...
...But virtue is not necessarily its own reward...
...And he wishes that the movement had not been driven to extreme alienation by the escalation of war: had it not been, he speculates, it could have matured slowly into a form that would have ultimately aided the liberal imperative rather than undermining it, helping to create a “soft landing into a Newer Deal...
...What about the weather service...
...Too oftcn, the authors rely on what elected officials say their policies have accomplished...
...He also writes about the ways in which a market economy automatically destroys, pointing up the great contradiction in present-day conservativism...
...First, they underestimated their extent and genuineness, then they oversimplified the situation and, like our radicals, often ignored the country’s complexity and the resilience of the old ways...
...Yet, as the authors note, he also left us with some of “the largest [budget] deficits in peacetime history...
...Because, as authors George Hager and Eric Pianin put it, this isn’t just a matter of tinkering with numbers...
...According to Kuttner, the government “walked a careful tightrope between discouraging Microsoft from using its market power to savage smaller rivals and resisting moves that might undercut Microsoft’s own earned market leadership...
...The success of such efforts, he argues, is predicated upon community involvement as well as vigorous support from state and local governments...
...The basic message of Banishing Bureaucracy is a sound one...
...But Marlin Fitzwater was sneering at Gorby as “a drugstore cowboy” and Bush was dawdling over exhaustive policy reviews that always warned the Soviets might not mean it...
...And we the people egg on the combatants...
...It also doesn’t account for the thousands of layoffs made by the new owners of those industries...
...According to Robert Kuttner, this approach-dear to Gingrich conservatives and some Clintonites-can actually lead to the wasting of economic resources...
...The nation’s leaders eyeball to eyeball...
...Palazchenko evidently finds it hard to forgive Yeltsin for slavering over the remains...
...As an example of successful iterative regulation, Kuttner points to the way Assistant Attorney General Anne Bingaman handled the anti-trust case against Microsoft in 1995...
...With one fateful move, the House Republicans had lost a lot of the public’s confidence in them...
...Before he became president he had made balancing the budget the Holy Grail of politics...
...We also back the special interests, making it harder to have a debate based on good sense and compromise...
...It symbolizes “national harmory Calvinist thrift, and the avoidance of corruption...
...There are, howevcr, three serious weaknesses with Banishing Bureaucracy that must he addressed if the reinvention movrincnt is to survive in thc long run...
...In fact, the governments praised in this book fought six general elections, and never won an electoral majority in any of them...
...Clinton refused to sign it, and the government was shut down...
Vol. 29 • May 1997 • No. 5
