The national Tea Party movement is obsessed with big government. Motivations behind this critique are tangled and confusing, but often echo Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” mantra that “government is the problem.” Distrust of government is furthered by the rise of neoliberial philosophy, the Washington Consensus promoting an unregulated global economy, and the reallocation of wealth in America to financial services, multinational corporations, and the top 1%. Forces that concentrate power and wealth have much to gain by weakening democracy and governance; it allows them to continue to externalize costs to the public’s commons and capture subsidies from the public’s treasury. Sarah Palin, bravely, is redirecting this diffuse anti-government Tea Party focus towards a more logical target: Crony Capitalism—the capture of government by large corporations. And here Tea Partiers overlap with the Occupy Wall Street.
Where Tea Party logic seems to confuse ideology with facts and lose touch with reality is when it preaches market fundamentalism—the belief that market outcomes are good, right, and to be accepted without question. Tea Partiers seem to worship efficiency as the theological equivalent of the golden rule. The market is always right; the market is efficient; so efficiency is always good. Big government is often inefficient, so it is bad.
Sorry, but that logic is flawed and it causes Tea Partiers to take their eyes off the prize.
Yes, the government is inefficient. But it is not designed to be efficient. It is designed to make and implement the difficult, value-laden choices that decision-experts call “wicked” because someone loses and no easy, optimal, or win-win solution exists. The Founding Fathers wanted government to be inefficient so that these wicked choices would be made infrequently, and hopefully only after careful and prolonged debate.
The market, on the other hand, works well for the easy choices—how much vanilla ice cream to make and what to charge for it. Our system of governance was designed to make moral choices that set the boundaries within which the market operates, such as when profit making becomes immoral (child labor, slavery), how much of a toxic body burden is acceptable (Clean Air, Clean Water acts), what should we do with the destitute and down cast in our community (Medicaid, mental health services, social security), when are marketing claims misrepresentations and thus wrong (free speech), and when does the right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness begin (Roe v Wade). We don’t want markets making these decisions.
The point I want to make in this essay is that local Tea Partiers are mistaken when they critique local government using the same logic that they use to critique federal government. They accept the national Tea Party critique of federal government and assume, without question, that the critique applies to local government as well. I agree with the critique of corporate cronyism. That problem will bring down America. Let’s fix it. But that same critique does not translate to local government, so the Tea Partiers vehement anti-government critique of all government, including local government, is misguided. It can even be dangerous if it derails decision-making processes for decisions that must be made. We need government at the local level to allocate resources to infrastructure, resolve disputes among property owners, and mobilize a vision of the future that residents will want to create and towards which they will contribute their resources.
Yes, local government will be inefficient and it will make decisions later deemed wrong and wasteful. That is the price we pay for justice, freedom, and equal opportunity. It is a consequence of humans not being omniscient. We must muddle our way into the future, creating it one step at a time, evaluating what we create and deciding whether to continue or redirect. That is democracy. Local government and planning processes are essential to this process. Local programs and policies all evolved to serve the public interest. Those interests have and will change over time, so must local programs and policies change. But to dismiss and berate the essential role of local government in our lives is wrong-headed. It asks us to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Yes things need to change. Yes, difficult decisions must be made. Yes, some people will win and other will lose. For these reasons we must continue to make decisions, we must continue to make local government work.