Platform for Common Good

To fix broken government, we need a vision of how it could work better. To show how simpler frameworks can engage individual initiative and responsibility, we will present a 16-plank platform and host public forums to engage reactions and other proposals.

The first shift we propose is this: Focus on the operating system of government. Promises don’t mean much if government can’t deliver, and if it drives citizens to distraction with unnecessary red tape.

Political debate is over goals. Build the Wall! Medicare for All! There’s certainly ample ground for disagreement over public priorities. But the main failure of Washington, largely ignored in the debates, is how government works:

• Public health officials waited weeks before Washington allowed them start testing for the COVID-19 virus. Red tape paralyzes public choices throughout society. Getting a permit to fix broken infrastructure takes longer than organizing the Apollo 11 moon landing.
• Why can’t bad cops be fired? Accountability is nowhere in government. “Sorry, the rule doesn’t allow it.” No official has responsibility for results.
• Healthcare red tape, much required by federal law, consumes over 30% of costs—making universal coverage hard to afford.
• Public schools are a hornet’s nest of competing entitlements and red tape, causing an epidemic of teacher burnout. Twenty-one states have fewer teachers than school administrators and other non-instructional employees.
• Congress is a soapbox, and has abdicated its responsibility to oversee a coherent legal framework for society. Instead of codes understandable to those expected to abide by them, the law of the land more closely resembles a giant legal junk pile. Programs are immortal. Obsolete subsidies from the New Deal consume billions of taxpayer dollars.
• Public paralysis has now infected daily dealings. Simple daily choices are weighed down by legal fears: “Can I prove that what I’m about to say or do is legally correct?” The land of the free is a legal minefield. Communities have lost meaningful control of schools and social services. The US ranks 55th in World Bank rankings in ease of starting a business.

Why are Americans so alienated from government? Public anger towards Washington is not caused by policy disagreements over, say, closing down coal-burning power plants. It’s caused by Big Brother breathing down everyone’s necks and preventing sensible choices.

The core flaw is an operating philosophy that prevents anyone, officials and citizens alike, from using their common sense. Instead of giving people goals they can understand, and holding them accountable, Washington weighs down daily choices with thousand-page rulebooks and extensive legal proceedings. Every year it gets denser, and more sclerotic, like a degenerative disease.

Our Platform for Common Good revives founding principles, starting with individual responsibility to meet public goals, and applies these principles to fix the failed institutions of modern government.

The Planks

1. The Legal Framework for COVID‑19 Recovery. The uncertainty in dealing with an invisible enemy underscores the need to re-empower officials at each level of responsibility and to allow officials to adapt as facts and science become clearer.
2. Restore Honor and Accountability to Public Service. The goal of public service should be to promote energy, honor, and effectiveness in government. Achieving it requires new employment frameworks built on the solid foundation of individual merit and accountability.
3. Purge School Bureaucracy to Unleash the Human Spirit. Successful schools can be very different, but a common thread is individual empowerment of teachers and principals. Success in the classroom hinges on the skill, caring, and personality of each teacher.
4. Reboot Healthcare: Focus Resources on Patient Care, Not Red Tape. Fixing the flaws of American healthcare requires a framework which liberates providers to focus on patients, not paperwork, and aligns incentives for prudent choices for both patients and providers.
5. Regulation: Focus on Results, Not Red Tape. The test of effective regulation is whether it enhances safety and reliability without undue costs or restrictions. Against this standard, much regulation fails—not because the regulatory goals of safety and quality are invalid, but because rigid rules rarely honor real life circumstances.
6. Restore Reliability to Lawsuits. Lawsuits have become a tool of extortion, not justice. The harm is much greater than occasional crazy verdicts. Fear of lawsuits has undermined Americans’ freedom to do what’s right. Reasonable freedoms have been replaced by an epidemic of defensiveness. Can you prove that what you just did or said is legally correct?
7. Give Communities Responsibility for Social Services. Local control of schools, social services, and public activities engages citizens in local democracy. People can innovate, and local leaders can draw on the energy and resources of volunteers.
8. Remake Civil Service. The civil service system is overdue for an overhaul. The original goal of a “merit system” remains as valid today as when it was created in the Pendleton Act of 1883.
9. Invest in the Future: Support Smart Infrastructure. America’s infrastructure is decrepit and out-of-date. A coordinated infrastructure investment plan will stimulate the economy, provide new jobs, and create a sustainable environmental footprint.
10. Protect the Environment. A core value of a healthy society is stewardship for future generations. As the world’s largest economy, the US has a practical and moral duty to lead a new world order to address the global effects of climate change and other environmental challenges.
11. Dislodge Electoral Money and Gamesmanship. Americans need an electoral system that offers responsible choices and does not skew incentives towards particular parties and interest groups. Voters should pick their leaders, instead of political parties picking their voters.
12. Reform Congress: Re-empower Committees and Restore Accountability for How Laws Work. The framers deliberately created a Congress that would have difficulty enacting new laws, counteracting the natural impulse to pass new laws whenever something goes wrong. But that same sluggishness makes it difficult to get rid of obsolete laws, and adapt old programs, and oversee the massive administrative state.
13. Revive Executive Authority to Use Common Sense. Implementing laws requires that officials be able to make tradeoffs and accommodations, adjusting to circumstances before them. Instead they are tied in legal knots, unable to act sensibly because of detailed controls imposed by Congress or because of regulatory micromanagement. The effect is to hamstring both officials and citizens. Civil servants are virtually unmanageable.
14. Obsolete Law: Time for a Spring Cleaning. America is trying to compete in the 21st century while dragging behind a trillion dollars of wasteful programs. Every year, more laws and regulations are added to the pile. Washington needs a spring cleaning, in order to free up resources for current priorities, and to make regulatory oversight more effective.
15. Expanding Job Opportunities and Income. America must stay true to its tradition as the land of opportunity. Yet many Americans find themselves in jobs which cannot support their families, and with little opportunity for meaningful advancement.
16. Honor Fiscal Responsibility. Stop Mortgaging the Future. Just as individuals must be accountable for the morality of their choices, so too must government, which represents our collective morality. Mortgaging the future to pay for current government expenditures is immoral—our children should not have to pay for our profligacy.
17. Honor Individual Freedom in Social Dealings. A core value of a free society must be freedom itself. People must feel free in daily interactions to be themselves—to make judgments, and express opinions, and to be spontaneous. Suppressing speech, humor, and daily banter is ultimately counterproductive.