CHAPTER 1

THE POWERLESSNESS OFPOWERFUL GOVERNMENT

... he finds himself surrounded by many who believethey are his equals, and because of that he cannotcommand or manage them the way he wants.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 9

If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimedby the powers that be." So said Max Weber, the greatest of Germanpolitical thinkers, in a famous lecture at Munich University in 1919under the title "Politik als Beruf." That might seem cynical, like a eulogyfor dictatorship, but it is nothing of the kind. Serious governments wantto rule. But also their populations want them to rule, to rule appropriately,of course, but therefore clearly to rule. Hence, in the American Declarationof Independence, "to secure these rights, Governments are institutedamong Men." We citizens want rule because we need rule for order, fairnessand protection. We need to hold the tyranny of government at baybut we also want, in our own interest, our governments to defeat our tyrannyover them. The problem, then, is obedience.

THE PUBLIC GOOD

Macho men want the government off their backs but are dead wrong, asthe bankers of the world learned after 2007 when the cost in money andesteem of radical deregulation caught up with them. When people livein society, it is government that prevents them from falling into the warof all against all that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed was thenatural state of affairs, and it is government that makes it possible for usto live lives that are useful for ourselves and others. The painter AmbrogioLorenzetti gave this knowledge life in fourteenth-century Italy withhis frescoes in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, where he created allegoriesof good government with happy people building their future in a city oforder and of bad government with idle people in a crumbling world. TheNorwegian Johan Bojer, in The Last Viking, his early twentieth-centuryepic of the winter fisheries in northern Norway in the age of sail, saw themagic at work where life is raw. A fjord is teeming with fish, the fishermenscramble for a take in the bounty, a minor civil war breaks out untilthe regulator arrives and restores order: linesmen in that part of the fjord,netsmen in the other. "A thousand men were transformed from animals tohuman beings again." On today's testing ground for progress, in Africa,the economist Paul Collier, in The Bottom Billion, sees a near perfect correlation:where government works, the economy works, and where theeconomy works there is government at work.

No wonder Aristotle praised "he who first founded the state [as] thegreatest of benefactors. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals,but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all."

In his first inaugural address, at the birth of the American republic,President George Washington defined the job of government as "the discernmentand pursuit of the public good." Citizens left to their own devicesare interested in their various little private goods, and at each other'sthroats. Governments are instituted to cut through that chaos and createa new reality that is public. They must discern: the public good must bedefined, explained and made accepted. They must pursue: the dominatedmust be made to obey, preferably by being made to want to obey.

LEADERS

Governments must get two things done. They must make policy and theymust put their policies to work in society. S. E. Finer, in The History ofGovernment, calls it decision making and decision implementing. In politicalreporting in the press, "politics" is almost always about the makingof policy, as it is in a great deal of writing in political science. The governmentis victorious when it is able to get its programme enacted and itloses when the opposition is able to defeat it. Well and good, those aretricky problems—but not the endgame problems. In making policy work,the challenge is just as much or more in implementation. Decisions areeverything for the members of the political class, but for society they arenothing unless they are implemented.

For example, on the 13th of February 2009, the United States Congressapproved President Barack Obama's near $800 billion economicstimulus package. That was only two weeks after his inauguration andwas, rightly, seen as a great victory. However, the money thereby allocatedwas supposed to flow through to hundreds of projects around the countryin infrastructural investments, schools, employment, social security, healthcare and much more. The decision by Congress on that day was only tomake the money available. What would flow through was yet to be seen.

An indication of some of what might happen was by coincidenceon display in the Helsinki newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet in Finland thevery next day. The Finnish government had launched its own stimuluspackage a few months earlier. A review by the paper revealed that in atleast some areas very little of what was intended had reached its objective.For reasons of legal wrangling and logistical problems, intended creditsto businesses through a government loans agency were being held up, aswas intended support to local municipalities through another governmentagency to stimulate housing construction.

President Obama's package was inspired in part by the initiatives ofPresident Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, but Roosevelt did much morethan to get money allocated. In his first one hundred days he not onlysummoned Congress and kept it working in emergency session to pushthrough fifty major recovery laws, but also followed up by creating a raftof new government agencies to carry allocated money into projects in thereal economy. In 2009, it took less than a week after Congress had approvedthe spending for reporting to emerge in the press about difficultiesof implementation. Political posts remained unfilled in the new...