Government would be the “conductor” who tries to think through what each instrument is best designed to do.
We do not face a “withering away of the state,” as Karl Marx promised. On the contrary, we need a vigorous, a strong, and a very active government. But we do face a choice between big and impotent government and a government that is strong because it confines itself to decision and direction and leaves the “doing” to others. We do not face a “return of laissez-faire” in which the enconomy is left alone. In all major areas we have a new choice in this pluralist society of organizations: an organic diversity in which institutions are used to do what they are best equipped to do.
Government would figure out how to structure a given political objective so as to make it attractive to one of the autonomous institutions. And just as we praise a composer for his ability to write “playable” music, which best uses the specific performance characteristic of French horn, violin, or flute, we may come to praise the lawmaker who best structures a particular task so as to make it most congenial for this or that of the autonomous, self-governing, private institutions of pluralist society.
Reprivatization will restore strength and performance capacity to sick and incapacitated government.
“Decentralization” applied to government would not be just another form of “federalism” in which local rather than central government discharges the “doing” tasks. It would rather be a systematic policy of using the other, the nongovernmental institutions of the society of organizations, for the actual “doing.” that is, for performance, operations, execution.
Government would start out by asking the question: “How do these institutions work and what can they do?” It would then ask: “How can political and social objectives be formulated and organized in such a manner as to become opportunities for performance for these institutions?” it would then ask: “And what opportunities for accomplishment of political objectives do the abilities and capacities of these institutions offer to government?” Reprivatization will not weaken government. Indeed, its main purpose is to restore strength and performance capacity to sick and incapacitated government. We cannot go much further along the road on which government has been traveling. All we can get this way is more bureaucracy and not more performance.
Government is a poor manager. It is, of necessity, concerned with procedure, and it is also, of necessity, large and cumbersome. Government is also properly conscious of the fact that it administers public funds and must account for every penny. It has no choice but to be “bureaucratic.” Whether government is a “government of laws” or a “government of men” is debatable. But every government is, by definition, a “government of forms.” This means inevitably high costs.
But, the purpose of government is to make fundamental decisions, and to make them effectively. The purpose of government is to focus the political energies of society. It is to dramatize issues. It is to present fundamental choices. The purpose of government, in other words, is to govern. This, as we have learned, in other institutions, is incompatible with “doing.” Any attempt to combine governing with “doing” on a large scale, paralyzes the decision-making capacity. Business has had to face, on a much smaller scale, the problem that modern government now faces: the incompatibility between “governing” and “doing.” Business management learned that the two have to be separated, and that the top organ, the decision maker, has to be detached from “doing.” Otherwise he does not make decisions, and the “doing” does not get done either. In business this goes by the name of “decentralization.”
Government ceased to be the rule setter, the facilitator, the insurer, the disbursement agent. It became the doer and the manager.
While the nation-state was the sole political reality in the centuries of empires and superstates, it has transformed itself profoundly in the last hundred years. It mutated into the Megastate. The shift from the national state to the Megastate began in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first small step toward the Megastate was German chancellor Bismarck’s invention in the 1880s of the Welfare State. The other major social program of the period immediately after World War II, the British National Health Service, was the first one (outside of the totalitarian countries) to take government beyond the role of insurer or provider. Hospitals and hospital care under the National Health Service were taken over by government. The people working in hospitals became government employees; and government actually manages the hospitals.
By 1960, it had become accepted doctrine in all developed Western countries that government is the appropriate agent for all social problems and all social tasks. And this held until the 1990s.
The profit motive alone gives fulfillment through power over things.
The only relevant and meaningful question is whether the profit motive is the socially most efficient one of the available directions in which the drive for power can be channeled. But we can say that of the channels available and known to us, the profit motive has a very high, if not the highest, social efficiency. All the other known forms in which the lust for power can be expressed offer satisfaction by giving the ambitious man direct power and domination over his fellow men. The profit motive alone gives fulfillment through power over things.
I believe it is socially and morally unforgivable when managers reap huge profits for themselves but fire workers.
I am for the free market. Even though it doesn’t work too well, nothing else works at all. But I have serious reservations about capitalism as a system because it idolizes economics as the be-all and end-all of life. It is one-dimensional. For example, I have often advised managers that a 20-1 salary ratio between senior executives and rank-and-file white-collar workers is the limit beyond which they cannot go if they don’t want resentment and falling morale to hit their companies.
Today, I believe it is socially and morally unforgivable when managers reap huge profits for themselves but fire workers. As societies, we will pay a heavy price for the contempt this generates among middle managers and workers. In short, whole dimensions of what it means to be a human being and treated as one are not incorporated into the economic calculus of capitalism. For such a myopic system to dominate other aspects of life is not good for any society.
Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in the free and equal society.
Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior. Capitalism did not, of course, invent the “profit motive.” Profit has always been one of the main motivating forces of the individual and will always be—regardless of the social order in which one lives. But the capitalist creed was the first and only social creed that valued the profit motive positively as the means by which the ideal free and equal society would be automatically realized. All previous creeds had regarded the profit motive as socially destructive, or at least neutral.
Capitalism has, therefore, to endow the economic sphere with independence and autonomy, which means that economic activities must not be subjected to noneconomic considerations, ut must rank higher. All social energies have to be concentrated upon the promotion of economic ends, because economic progress carries the promise of the social millennium. This is capitalism: and without this social end it has neither sense nor justification.
Religion cannot accept any society without abandoning its true Kindom.
The End of Economic Man reached the conclusion that the churches could not, after all, furnish the basis for European society and European politics. They had to fail, though not for the reasons for which the contemporaries tended to ignore them. Religion could indeed offer an answer to the despair of the individual and to his existential agony. But, it could not offer an answer to the despair of the masses. I am afraid that this conclusion still holds today. Western Man—indeed today Man altogether—is not ready to renounce this world. Indeed he still looks for secular salvation, if he expects salvation at all. And churches, especially Christian churches, can (and should) preach a “social gospel.” But they cannot (and should not) substitute politics for Grace, and social science for Redemption. Religion, the critic of any society, cannot accept any society or even any social program, without abandoning its true Kingdom, that of a Soul alone with it God. Therein lies both the strength of the churches as the conscience of society and their incurable weakness as political and social forces of society.
