Government is on Autopilot. And Headed for Disaster.

Philip K. Howard, the author of
1995’s influential treatise against bureaucracy and stultifying
regulations, The Death of Common Sense, has a new
book out. It’s called The Rule of Nobody and it’s an
important discussion of “automatic government” that combines the
worst elements of technocracy and mindless do-gooderism; it’s a
demented version of “the rule of law.” I talk about it in
my latest Daily Beast column. Snippets:

“Under current orthodoxy,” writes Howard, “the ideal government
runs like a software program: Input the facts and out comes a
decision.” While stressing that such a “technocratic model…has
many plausible virtues” and evolved as a way to combat favoritism
and partisan whimsy, he convincingly argues that contemporary
government has removed virtually all scope for human intervention
and responsibility. The result isn’t a fairer, more predictable
form of government, but “a form of tyranny,” says Howard. “The fact
that the tyrant is a bureaucratic blob instead of Birmingham police
chief Bull Connor means that our freedom is smothered instead of
subjugated at the point of a weapon.”

Putting more and more decisions – especially spending decisions
– on a sort of autopilot is good for pols, of course, and for
favored constituencies.

It’s clear why politicians like “mandatory” spending: It
absolves them of any real responsibility while also shoveling
heaping servings of cash to high-turnout voters. For all the rancor
in D.C., neither Democrats nor Republicans show the least bit of
interest in seriously tackling entitlement reform or shifting
“mandatory” spending into “discretionary” funding, where it would
come up for an annual and on-the-record vote.

Of course, the problem is that putting increasing amounts of
spending, including increasing amounts of automatic increases in
spending, on autopilot means that governments can’t deal with
changed circumstances. Does anyone seriously think that the need
for and structure of Social Security—created during the Great
Depression, for god’s sake, and at a time when there
were 160
workers per beneficiary—is relevant to 21st-century America, in
which households headed by seniors have 47
times the wealth of households headed by people under 35
years old?

Read the whole thing.