OBDS GOVERNMENT

Look around.  It is indisputable that big, old, slow, dumb, industrial age government has failed us.  In today’s fast moving, complex, dynamic world, government of the industrial age is an anachronism; it doesn’t really govern much of anything, does it?

It spends a lot of money, it is tremendously powerful, but does it govern our schools? Our health-care system?  Our retirement systems?  Our economy?  Even itself?  No.

Our frustration with it is boiling over.  Big, old, slow, dumb government has made nearly everything it has touched worse.  Reliably, it hurts the very people it has tried to help, while it has driven the rest of us into near bankruptcy.  It’s time for a change.  It’s time for a new and different approach.  It’s time for something that works.

Old, big, dumb, slow (OBDS) government is headed to the dustbin of history.  Do we want OBDS to take our country with it?

Seriously, if we created our government in Washington right now, at this moment in the rapidly evolving age of technology and communications, do we think it would look anything like the old, bloated, factory-like policy machine that we see in our nation’s capital today?  Not a chance.

If we invented Washington today, it would probably have one-fifth of the buildings, and one-tenth of the people.  We would replace most of its functions with a handful of good websites.

If we created American “government” today, we would not dream of taking money out of people’s pockets, sending it all the way to Washington, handing it over to politicians and bureaucrats to staple thousands of pages of artificial and political instructions to it, wear that money out by grinding it through the engine of bureaucratic friction… then sending what’s left of it back to our pockets, where it all started, to grow the American economy.

What we are doing now to govern ourselves is not just wrong,  it is not just a failure,  it is out-of-date.

Can we govern ourselves and solve social problems beyond the limited abilities of the old-fashioned, command-and-control, public sector?  You bet.