DAVID BROOKS WONDERS WHY THE GOVERNMENT CAN’T DO ANYTHING ANYMORE:

Why are important projects now unaffordable? Decades ago, when the federal and state governments were much smaller, they had the means to undertake gigantic new projects, like the Interstate Highway System and the space program. But now, when governments are bigger, they don’t.

The answer is what Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal once called demosclerosis. Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct it toward unproductive ones.

That’s exactly right, and Rauch’s book, Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government, remains just as timely as in the 1990s, when it came out.

Brooks is also right about this:

This situation, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, has been the Democratic Party’s epic failure. The party believes in the positive uses of government. But if you want the country to share that belief, you have to provide a government that is nimble, tough-minded and effective. That means occasionally standing up to the excessive demands of public employee unions. Instead of standing up to those demands, the party has become captured by the unions. Liberal activism has become paralyzed by its own special interests.

But there’s a lesson that he misses. Brooks calls for a political party that won’t be for more government or less government, but for making the right choices. The problem is that any party given the power to create more government will likely do so, and to hell with making the right choices. The web of special interests is very strong.

There is at least a partial solution, and I wrote about it in my Vanderbilt Law Review article entitled Is Democracy Like Sex? which got some attention back when it came out. It’s all about enhancing resistance to parasitism through turnover. We’re likely to see some of that in November, anyway . . . .

The other issue is headroom. In audio engineering, headroom is the difference between the level you’re at now, and the maximum level the system can sustain. In the old days, when government was small, there was lots of headroom. Now, government is huge, and there’s not much headroom at all.

UPDATE: Reader Charles Austin emails:

Perhaps it also has something to do with what the government is trying to do.

An Interstate Highway System is a concrete (no pun intended), easily definable thing with a clear cut measure of success and expected costs. A space program is something that can also have clear, defined goals and success criteria though admittedly the cost is a little more nebulous (pun intended).

Now the government wants to accomplish tasks which are oxymoronic (providing more health care for less money by fiat), utterly unobtainable (eliminating poverty — especially when the goalposts keep moving), and indicative of childish wishful thinking (every increasing public sector pensions and refusing to even acknowledge the Ponzi scheme nature of Social Security). And what’s more, they try to accomplish these goals by passing legislation they can’t be bothered to read while constantly telling us how much smarter they are than the hoi polloi, lecturing us little people on our excesses and sins while virtually flaunting the same behavior themselves, and living like royalty on the public nickel while the times get harder and harder for those outside their insulated, pampered, tax-payer funded existence.

Roads and space program exploits aren’t amenable to postmodern analysis, wealth redistribution, social justice or fairness. Besides how many of them could even get a job actually building a road or designing a satellite?

Yes, old-fashioned programs of tangible value are different from today’s redistributive efforts at social “change.”

UPDATE: Reader Dart Montgomery writes that I should provide a direct link to Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. Done! Olson’s book is a must-read, and far more relevant to our current problems than, say, Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, though less stylish because it’s harder to turn Olson’s work in a specifically anti-military direction.

Here’s a short summary of Olson’s book, from a reader review forwarded by Montgomery: “Professor Olson describes a wide range of social/economic structures and processes (unions, big government, high and rising taxes, regulation, monopolies, etc.) that characterize most economies but more so the aging economies of Western Europe (This book was written before the unification of eastern and western Europe). He then proceeds to show us what these all have in common: They each, together and with time, contribute in increasingly slowing down and stifling a nation’s economy.”