He Don't Know Nothing

Recently I wrote a piece about redevelopment agencies, and how efforts to repair and build downtown areas had been hijacked in the past 50 years by urban sprawl proponents. I was talking about how local governments had failed, and most of us didn't pay attention, because frankly redevelopment is a pretty mundane and boring thing.

My point was, while we weren't looking, speculators and quick buck artists have moved in, modified redevelopment efforts to line their pockets, and left California with millions of square feet of retail space that will be empty for the next fifty years.

One of the criticisms of my piece was that I am an "educator", not a businessman so don't know anything about such matters.

"You never made a payroll, hired or fired", or did all those esoteric things business people do.

Oh really? I was a school administrator for most of my educational career. In the district I worked most of my career, we had a payroll of about 400! I hired, I fired, I dealt with the union. I administered workman's comp, I balanced budgets (or at least tried); etc., etc.

The idea that government is not a business is ridiculous. The myth that "if only we ran the government like a business, things would get better" is ridiculous.

Every governmental service, every one, uses the same business priciples as private enterprise.

Sometimes that can be a problem, especially with social services, because people are not widgets. Using production models to manage large scale social programs often backfires. In fact, running social programs solely like a business is a bad idea.

The record is repleat with examples of "business people" trying to run school districts and failing; not because business principles don't apply, but because they don't understand the culture.

That was the point of my previous article. Lewis Mumford (that nobody bothered apparently to Google), studied and wrote about how urbanization created a culture, that greatly affected government. That is proven by a study of redevelopment and urban sprawl, which affects our culture today in mostly negative ways.

For example, dispite the fact that there are many more of us in smaller areas, Americans today are more isolated from one another. How can that be?

We spend hours each week sitting alone in our vehicles, droning away at 10 miles per hour, going to and fro from work. We listen to talk radio, that rants about the damn government, the damn liberals, and pushes a conservative agenda constantly.

It is no wonder that people hate government, distrust public schools, want to give tax cuts endlessly; even though they don't work to much help the econony.

A propaganda machine works on us everyday; one , by the way, that does not care about truth.

So we watch, and we bemoan our helplessness, as our political system sinks into dysfunctional oblivion.

We can still change this. We can read. We can use empirical evidence to prove that tax cutting does NOT stimulate job creation; that governmental programs, can be well run, and can revitalize our economy without waste.

And, these can be implemented and not cost liberty, or the private sector, any distress.

In fact, liberty, social justice, and even economic justice can co-exist.

But our culture will have to change. We will have to get out of our gas guzzling cars, agree to pay higher taxes, and demand that our tax money be used efficiently and well.

And yes, we can run government like a business; a caring, compassionate and competitive business for the best intersts of us all.

It is right there, in the Preamble to the Constitions...."We the People.....