Permit me, our dear readers of this column, to present to you the final part of the following essay, entitled “A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto”, which is of much interest. Dated September 5, 1982, it was written by Charles Peters, who is the editor of the Washington Monthly. It is as follows:

Today a person who starts out in politics has a tiny field of opportunity in the federal government — congressman, senator, and just two thousand appointive positions. What if we opened hundreds of thousands of federal jobs to political appointees, replacing through normal attrition roughly half the federal government’s 2.8 million civilian employees? Give the new people 2 ½-year appointments, with a limit of five years on the time they would be permitted to remain in government. This would bring people with real-world experience into government, attract more risk-takers not obsessed with job security, and provide a legitimate reward for political participation. The reward would be legitimate, because the unqualified would not profit from it; your sister Susie who can’t type 20 words a minute still would not be allowed to get that government typing job, no matter how hard she worked in your campaign. Because the jobs would be limited to a few years, we also would constantly be sending back into the ranks of the voting public people who have learned first-hand why Washington doesn’t work and who have nothing to lose from speaking out about the reforms that are needed.

But suppose the Reaganites were permitted to begin making such appointments now? They would do some harm; that I cannot dispute. But we could elect a different president in 1984 and replace all the Reaganites. This is not to say that I think career civil servants serve no useful purpose. If I felt that way — if I didn’t want to keep the Philip Habibs — I wouldn’t advocate retaining half of them. They provide continuity, institutional memory, and an insurance policy against the excesses of the politicians. But we also need more incentives for people to participate in politics and a dramatic increase in the number of people who understand the government. If this approach had been in effect for even a decade, we would have a nation far better equipped to appraise the budget cuts that are said to be needed, that wouldn’t have to guess where the fat is, because it would have the sophistication to know exactly where to find it. We would have people in government who, because they’d spent most of their lives on the outside, would have genuine empathy for the problems of those on the outside.

The lack of such empathy has been the most glaring deficiency of the bureaucracy since I have been in Washington. And I fear it will become worse, because the mindless Reaganite attack on the bureaucracy is going to exacerbate the civil servants’ tendency toward self-protection, just as did the equally mindless McCarthy attack of the 1950s. What is the evidence that a system of democratic accountability would work better than the unaccountable civil service we have now? Those who were alive in the 1930s will remember that the post office delivered your packages intact and your letters on time, twice a day, in fact. That postal system was blatantly political. If your mail didn’t come on time, you could complain to your congressman, and he would arrange for a new postmaster if he wanted to be reelected. The postal system became progressively less political in subsequent years and became completely nonpolitical in 1968. What has happened to your mail? What happens when you complain now? You probably don’t even bother. That’s why the present bureaucracy is so discouraging to democracy — the citizen who speaks up knows he is wasting his time. He calls Federal Express instead.

One of the problems facing the new liberals is the way we are misunderstood by the old liberals. I am sure that most of them have read what I have written here as advocating a return to the days of the Vietnam draft, robber barons, Tammany patronage, and coerced prayer. I have, of course, advocated none of those things. In each case, I have said something different, and it is important that the old liberals attend to the difference. At the same time, the new liberal must be willing to risk misunderstanding. Risk is indeed the essence of the movement — the risk of the person who has the different idea in industry or in government. That is why we place such a high value on the entrepreneur. The economic, social, and political revitalization we seek is going to come only through a dramatic increase in the number of people willing to put themselves on the line, to take a chance at losing all, at looking ridiculous.

Risk-taking is important, not only in career terms, but in the way one looks at the world and the possibilities it presents. If, for example, you see only a narrow range of choices, if you are a prisoner of conventional, respectable thinking, you are unlikely to find new ways out of our problems. That’s why some neo-liberals, who are on the whole internationalists and free-traders, are willing to consider such bizarre ideas as getting out of NATO, forgetting about the Persian Gulf, embargoing Japanese cars, or requiring that, in part at least, they be built here. The basic problems we’re trying to address is that American industry’s ability to compete has been seriously impaired by the amount of money we have spent in the common defense as compared with our competition and that we must find some dramatic way to redress the balance. Similar reasoning applies to problems such as Boeing’s struggle against the foreign government-subsidized airbus. Shouldn’t our government do whatever is necessary to make sure the competition is fair? Neo-liberals would certainly be willing to consider this idea. Traditional liberals would recoil at the thought of helping big corporations in any way.

From all this you can see that neo-liberalism has two kinds of opposition from other liberals. One is from the traditional anti-business, pro-union, throw-money-at-social-problems liberal; the other, very common in Washington, is the respectable liberal—the Brookings Institution is his spiritual home — who sees the possibility of change as so small that he is willing to take seriously only proposals that fall within that narrow range. As an example of how these two kinds of liberals would react to a neo-liberal proposal, consider my own latest cause: Bring back the WPA — bring it back to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, to give people jobs, to give the poor money to spend. The traditional liberal would be perfectly willing to finance the WPA, but he would worry so much about offending the unions that he would probably amend the appropriations bill to require that no WPA employee do real work. (If you think I’m being fanciful, you should know that just such a provision governs the affairs of New York’s public works program.) The respectable liberal would not have gotten even this far. He would refuse to consider an increase in the deficit, and he would smugly assume that the neo-liberals hadn’t considered how to finance the proposal. In fact, we have considered how to finance it. We are, after all, determined to be practical, not to be the kind of liberal who spends without regard to income.

Here’s how we would do it: Eliminate the increases in federal pay and pensions and the new tax cuts scheduled for the coming fiscal year (some employees deserve more and some of the cuts are desirable, but by and large both measures constitute welfare for the middle and upper classes), and make the reductions that we specified in an article called “35 Ways to Cut the Defense Budget” in The Washington Monthly. This would produce about $60 billion to finance the program, which in turn would lower attempts for unemployment, providing more tax revenue to finance an even larger program. Our aims are humane (to give the unemployed the dignity of work) and pragmatic (to support long-term prosperity with a rebuilt infrastructure and to stimulate short-term recovery by putting money in the hands of people who will spend it). We’re consumer-siders, not supply-siders. Investors need more than tax incentives to invest in new plants. They need to see customers out there ready to buy. If you’re thinking this is a crazy, impossible idea, you may be right. I don’t think so, but I’ll concede the possibility in order to get to the next point, which is that neo-liberalism is not just a program but a new way of looking at things, a new lens, a wide-angle lens. You’ll have to consider more wrong answers. But the point is that you will also see more right ones. When your ship is sinking, it may not be enough to look just at that hole in the hull and think about how to repair it. You may need to think of a new law of physics or remember an old one, like Keynesian economics, that no longer is fashionable. If you look through a narrow lens, you’ll see only the hole. The wide angle just might save you.

(The End).
[email protected]
May 28, 2023
Finca Solana
Corozal Town