I felt a chill go through me when listening to President Reagan's first inaugural address. Our problems, he said, are not problems government can solve; rather, government is the problem. Indeed, we do have problems for which government has no solution, and even some it has caused. But if government itself is the "problem," then, suggests Dwight Waldo, a Syracuse professor emeritus and former editor in chief of Public Administration Review, the problem is solved by abolishing government.
I have listened many more Reagan speeches since the inauguration in 1981. Luckily, we still have the government, and he is the chief executive of the government, although if Reagan is succeeded by another Reaganite, the government may become an extinct species. Shall we then enact a law for the protection of the government? How about the Endangered Government Act?
The 1973 Endangered Species Act does not cover the human institution. It covers animals and plants, yet government is surely more precious than snail darters (a species of three-inch, tannish-colored perch), or any other endangered life form currently under the protection of law.
Alfred Marshall, a noted economist, remarked that government is the most precious of human possessions, and that no effort can be too great when spent in enabling government to do its work in the best way. Through most of the history of civilization, political administration, not private or business administration has been at center stage. I don't know whether or not future times will place private or business administration over the affairs of state, but whatever the future holds, the role of government will doubtless be preserved with in the structure of society.
We created the government out of particular needs and circumstances. The American experiment was inaugurated with the establishment of a federal government two hundred years ago, and the political system that has evolved remains the precious legacy of the Founding Fathers at the Philadelphia Convention.
Early laissez-faire economic policies, which promoted the survival of the fittest, also did brutal damage to the economic order. In response to certain abuses (for example, in the railroad industry, which suffered from hasty construction, stock-watering, market manipulation, kickbacks, and other forms of unethical treatment), Congress enacted regulatory legislation to curb some business activities, which in turn resulted in the formation of independent regulatory agencies. The Interstate Commerce commission, for instance, was created in 1887 in order to protect both consumers and business.
During the New Deal era, the government ultimately intervened because the private sector could not solve the problems. Progress demanded that the government assume the role of arbiter of the goods and scarce resources in the 1930s, and again, to become the promoter of ethics and social justice in the 1960s.
Regulatory, redistributive, and ethical functions made our government big, perhaps too big. Big is always a relative concept. Those functions, though, were mandated by a collective American consciousness. The government has responded to citizens' desires, and although citizens' desires sometimes may be unrealistic, irrational, and otherworldly, they
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