Our problems are not first and foremost technical problems. Better management is no doubt necessary. But it will not set us straight. At best, it will delay the day of reckoning. Rearranging the deck chairs might have improved life on the Titanic, but it would not have saved the ship. At the deepest level, our problems are spiritual and moral. They have to do with the direction in which we are tending.
Government programs, as such, cannot directly address these problems. It is not within our power to make men good; and, if we tried to do so, we would, like helicopter parents, do them untold harm.
Talk of making the government more efficient and "running government like a business" really misses the boat (this is for you Mitt Romney). The problem lies not so much with the inefficiencies that bureaucracies foster, which is but a symptom of the larger problem, but with bureaucracy itself. Ultimately, bureaucracy or administrative government strikes at the heart of the principle of consent of the governed that undergirds (or did) our republic. This, however, goes into the realm of moral philosophy, which is today generally cut completely out of our value-free public education. As the saying goes today, "Who are we to put our values on anyone else?" This is the crux of the matter.
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