Salon.com > Big government

Memorial Day should also honor fallen police, firefighters and teachers

Mon, 27 May 2013 11:45:00 +0000

I am the grandson of a veteran, and so among other things, Memorial Day brings up early childhood memories of my dad's dad telling me about his public service in the military. While he gave me kid-friendly versions of his recollections, I was just old enough to vaguely understand his allusions to the injuries, casualties, lost friends and the trauma he likely experienced while serving overseas in World War II. Those allusions to the downsides of war - downsides that are too often glossed over in our sanitized recollections of World War II - gradually informed the way I came to see Memorial Day as a sacred moment to honor those who lost their lives in service to America.

In recent years, though, I have found our national celebration of Memorial Day lacking because while I am indeed the grandson of a soldier, I am also the son, son-in-law, nephew and friend of many other kinds of public servants. Through their civilian work, I have come to understand public service as something much more than only military service. Trouble is, while there may be a few lower profile days meant to honor their service, these public servants are not included as part of the high-profile Memorial Day - even though they should be.

There’s no substitute for government disaster relief

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Within hours of this week's tornado disaster in Oklahoma, I (like many others) received emails from the president of the United States and my U.S. senator. With impassioned language, they both claimed to care deeply about yet another community devastated by a cataclysm, and then said the best way for America to support private charities.

The work of non-governmental organizations, no doubt, is critical, and contributing money to them is laudable. But there is something troubling about government leaders initially implying -- if subtly -- that a non-governmental response is as significant as a governmental one. And there is something even more disturbing about that message being sent at a time when budget cuts and sequestrations engineered by those very governmental leaders threaten to prevent a more effective response to such disasters in the future.

It all suggests that the anti-government zeitgeist in America has become so powerful that public officials now feel compelled to downplay the public sector for fear of being tarred and feathered as a socialist, a Marxist or an opportunist unduly "politicizing" a tragedy.

Big government isn’t the problem

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Has the United States mutated from democracy into kludgeocracy? The term “kludgeocracy” is a coinage by Steven M. Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a leading public intellectual in his own right. In a new paper commissioned by my colleagues and me at the New America Foundation, Teles argues that the complexity of American government is a greater long-run threat than its size.

“You can’t solve a problem until you can name it,” Teles argues. The term “kludge” originated in computer programming, and means “an inelegant patch put in place to be backward compatible with the rest of a system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program, one that is hard to understand and subject to crashes.” This sounds very much like American government -- thus “kludgeocracy.”

Teles finds kludgeocracy everywhere he looks. Sometimes it takes the form of multiple, overlapping or contradictory programs to promote a single objective. For example, to promote the objective of retirement security, Social Security, a simple and straightforward program, must now compete with “401(k)s, IRAs, 529 plans and the rest of our crazy quilt of savings incentives.”