Pathological liar Robert Reich offers a commentary on Wednesday morning’s “Marketplace Radio” (not posted yet) complaining that American companies are not lobbying for more spending on science and math education because they are unpatriotically opening labs and software design offices in India and China. So let’s see … he’s upset that the people of the world’s two largest countries are finally entering the modern world, and he’s upset that huge American businesses are not lobbying for more business subsidies. What a great liberal!
Cato at Liberty
Cato at Liberty
Email Signup
Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!
Topics
General
Political Governance vs. Corporate Governance
A New York Times columnist says it may be a mistake to try “to make government run more like a business.” Citing research by Matthias Benz and Bruno S. Frey, summarized by Larry Yu, the Times says that government works better than the private sector:
The authority over government is split among the branches of government. In business, Mr. Yu writes, “even if directors have stepped up their governance in recent years, institutional norms still stack the deck in favor of C.E.O.’s.”
And while chief executives and directors can serve forever, politicians need to face re-election regularly.
When it comes to corporate governance, maybe there is something to be learned from governments.
Well, let’s see. According to a Booz Allen study, dismissals of corporate CEOs have risen sharply in the past decade. Among the world’s 2,500 largest public companies, “CEOs are as likely to leave prematurely as to retire normally. Continuing a pattern from 2004, in 2005 nearly half of all CEO departures were due to poor performance or mergers.”
Meanwhile, almost no members of Congress are removed from office involuntarily. As this chart shows, House reelection rates are approaching 100 percent.
Does that mean that the U.S. government is performing so much better than the average company that there’s no need for change? It seems unlikely that even the Times columnist would make that claim. No, if you read the links above from Booz Allen and the Washington Monthly, you can see some of the differences between politics and business: Business is competitive, to begin with. There are 2,500 large companies in the survey, all competing with one another and with millions of upstart challengers. If Sears and K‑Mart don’t stay on their toes, Target and Wal-Mart will take their business. Wikipedia lists pages and pages of defunct companies, all of which failed to satisfy customers. Executives lost their jobs, and shareholders lost their money, and those realities are a powerful incentive to executives and shareholders of other companies. Corporate boards are getting more aggressive, and different companies are testing different rules for governance — outsider CEOs, separating the jobs of CEO and chairman, acquisitions, divestitures, going public, going private — in an attempt to find the rules that will produce the greatest customer satisfaction and thus the greatest profits.
Contrast that with government. Failed bureaucrats are almost never fired; indeed, the standard response to bureaucratic failure is to appropriate more money for the agency. Gerrymandering, campaign finance restrictions, and taxpayer-funded constituent service and propaganda make it almost impossible for a member of Congress to be turned out of office. People spend other people’s money far less efficiently than their own.
I think the Times got it backwards. It would be more appropriate to say, “When it comes to government, maybe there is something to be learned from corporate governance” — such as the value of decentralization and competition, retirement ages or term limits, and real penalties for poor performance. Since those factors are unlikely to occur in political systems, the best lesson is to keep as much of life as possible in the private sector.
Related Tags
“Abolish Religious Schools” — Guardian Columnist
In response to the latest Islamist terrorist plot, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee makes the following recommendation:
A new Commission on Integration and Cohesion, launching this month, will be worthless unless its first recommendation is to end religious and ethnic segregation in schools. That means no Church of England or Catholic schools, no Muslim or Jewish schools.
Ah yes, social cohesion through religious tyranny, a winning strategy down through the centuries. Nyet.
A nation that fought a number of civil wars over (among other things) the repression of religious freedom should have learned that compulsion in matters of faith does not breed social harmony. I would have thought Ms. Toynbee particularly well equipped to pass along that historical pearl, given that she is the descendant of not one but two well known British historians. Apparently the nut does sometimes fall far from the tree.
The Evolutionary War, Part Deux
In response to an earlier post, a reader e‑mails with the following comment: “Intelligent Design is fundamentally a religious theory and thus cannot be taught in public schools according to the First Amendment.”
Regrettably, it’s not that simple. For the first century of their existence, state schools engaged in official prayer and Bible reading in bald defiance of the First Amendment. That official religiosity was only discontinued after a 1963 Supreme Court ruling. There’s no reason it couldn’t come back. The sad truth is that our Constitution and Bill of Rights are regularly trampled over by legislators who find their content inconvenient (viz., the 10th Amendment).
Furthermore, there is no guarantee that all courts, in perpetuity, will see Intelligent Design as a religious theory, as happened to be the case in last year’s Pennsylvania District Court verdict [.pdf].
Even at present, public schools in many parts of the country have watered down their coverage of the theory of evolution to avoid rousing the ire of adherents of ID or creationism. This is perhaps part of the reason that only 13 percent of Americans think humans evolved through entirely natural processes, while the rest think they were created in their present form (46%), or guided in their evolution (31%), by the god of their choice.
Natural human evolution has been public schools’ sole explanation for human origins for three generations, and that is the result. The official knowledge thing has thus already been tried, at length, and it has failed on its own terms.
Parental choice is a better approach. Those who want their children to receive a high-quality secular scientific education will be able to get it – which many cannot do in our current public schools. And those who want to pass along their religious beliefs about human origins to their children will be free to do so, without being forced to wheedle those beliefs into the official government schools for which they are compelled to pay.
Most important of all, in a country founded on freedom of conscience and individual liberty, it is not the government’s proper role to indoctrinate children with the majority’s views (or, in this case, a tiny but influential minority’s views) – whether or not you or I happen to think those views are correct.
Still more here.
Dr. Cardin’s Misdiagnosis
Maryland congressman Ben Cardin is running for the Democratic nomination for US Senate. But apparently he has a higher calling in mind. Cardin promises that if he’s elected, we will find a cure for cancer. He even released a television commercial in which a cancer survivor credits Cardin, who is not a doctor, with saving his life. “Thanks to Ben Cardin, others can have their chance. … He’s literally a lifesaver.” (The ad is an apparent reference to Cardin’s advocacy of early screening under Medicare.)
However, if Cardin truly wants to help cancer patients, perhaps he should reexamine his policy proposals. The congressman is a supporter of single-payer national health care. However, the rationing under such national health care systems means more cancer patients die. For example, even though American men are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than their counterparts in other countries, we are less likely to die from the disease. Fewer than one out of five American men with prostate cancer will die from it, but 57 percent of British men and nearly half of French and German men will. Even in Canada, a quarter of men diagnosed with prostate cancer die from the disease.
That is in part because in most countries with national health insurance, the preferred treatment for prostate cancer is… to do nothing. Prostate cancer is a slow-moving disease. Most patients are older and will live for several years after diagnosis. Therefore it is not cost-effective in a world of socialized medicine to treat the disease too aggressively. The approach saves money, but comes at a significant human cost.
Related Tags
Gimme That Old Time Sci-ence
Much of America’s soi-pensant intellectual left opposes school choice as a solution to the Intelligent Design vs. Evolution battle. They argue that some things, like science instruction, are too important to be left to the discretion of the drooling masses “unqualified” parents. The state must step in, they believe, to ensure that all children are taught the non-Gospel, God-not-fearing, scientific TRUTH.
A small problem with this “reasoning” is that it fails to consider the possibility that the state might not always be in possession of said TRUTH. Consider, for instance, the recent words of Arkansas’ Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Mike Beebe: “I believe in intelligent design and I don’t think intelligent design and evolution are mutually exclusive.” Beebe went on to tell reporters that intelligent design should be available to students alongside curriculum on evolution theory. The Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, Jim Holt, “called evolution a ‘fraud theory’ and said that keeping intelligent design out of the classroom is censorship.”
Thanks to the federal government’s accelerating usurpation of control over the nation’s public schools, it is not difficult to imagine a day when such candidates hold federal office and can shape instruction in classrooms all across America.
How, exactly, would that protect the scientific truth so ostensibly dear to the anti-choice left?
This is why the latent totalitarianism of so many American intellectuals is remarkably short sighted. It might not always be a friendly face waiving from the back seat of the flag-adorned staff-car….
More here.
Related Tags
Where Are the Conservatives?
When the Education Department was created in 1979, many critics warned that a secretary of education would turn into a national minister of education. Rep. John Erlenborn (R‑Ill.), for instance, wrote,
There would be interference in textbook choices, curricula, staffing, salaries, the make-up of student bodies, building designs, and all other irritants that the government has invented to harass the population. These decisions which are now made in the local school or school district will slowly but surely be transferred to Washington.
Dissenting from the committee report that recommended establishing the department, Erlenborn and seven other Republicans wrote, “The Department of Education will end up being the Nation’s super schoolboard. That is something we can all do without.”
That’s why Ronald Reagan promised to abolish Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education in his 1980 campaign. And why House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich put abolition of the department in his budget proposal after the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress.
But things changed. Instead of eliminating or at least reducing federal intervention in local schools, Republicans in 2001 decided to dramatically escalate it with the No Child Left Behind Act. And now Jeb Bush, whom some conservatives call the best governor in the country, writes in the Washington Post (along with Michael Bloomberg) that we should strengthen NCLB. Make it tougher, they write, with real standards and real enforcement. Create data systems to “track” every student. Create federal standards for teachers.
If there’s an earthquake this week, it may be caused by Madison, Taft, Goldwater, and Reagan turning over in their graves. Imagine it: the leading conservative governor in America, considered a pioneer in education reform, wants the distant federal government to come into his state’s schools and impose tougher rules and regulations. And even the Wall Street Journal’s redoubtable editorial page deplores “rampant noncompliance” with federal mandates and “lax enforcement” by Big Brother in Washington.
In its new issue, American Conservative magazines asks two dozen leading intellectuals “What is left? What is right? Does it matter?” Not if leading conservatives have made their peace with federal control of local schools–and are demanding that the feds crack down on the locals.