Ira Stoll has a follow-up on his column from last year, by highlighting Zenefits Insurance Services, a company designing software to help businesses keep compliance costs down, especially with the new Obamacare regulations coming down the pike:
‘The company’s co-founder and CEO is Parker Conrad, a former managing editor of the Harvard Crimson and cancer survivor who I tried unsuccessfully to hire at the New York Sun. If someone has to make money from the “compliance complexities” of ObamaCare, I’m glad it’s him.’
I keep putting up this quote from Stoll’s original piece:
‘Indeed, if there is a single fact that sums up the state of American political economy at the present moment, it is this: the Boston office building once home to Inc. Magazine and Fast Company, which chronicled and celebrated small and fast-growing businesses, is now the headquarters of a publication called “Compliance Week.”’
These past decades have seen Washington D.C. and surrounding counties grow at a very fast rate, as people move there in pursuit of their talents, jobs and opportunity. The business of D.C. is politics, mostly.
Some people’s guiding ideals and moral lights lead them naturally to activism and leveraging political power to advance their interests, but certainly not all. Individually, I’m guessing there are people willing to accept pursuing opportunity in the public sector, instead of the private, where a lot of money and jobs currently are, especially in a down economy. These incentives will have them primarily managing other people’s lives, money, and time, through laws, tax revenue, and regulations.
This doesn’t seem commensurate long-term with a growing economy, more individual liberty and social mobility, nor a limited government which tends to keep more freedoms and responsibility in the hands of greater numbers of people, should they want that freedom and responsibility.
We’ve been getting a good look at the incentives, inertia and design flaws inherent in bureaucratic organizations lately.
Are we in decline? A rough patch of road? A tipping point?
Related On This Site: Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working. Check out his series at The American Interest.
Once broader ideas of the public good take hold, they tend to lead to greater claims of the public square, and view market activity as an animal to be harnessed: Amartya Sen In The New York Review Of Books: Capitalism Beyond The Crisis
Tom Palmer From Cato@Liberty: ‘Crony Capitalism’
.So, Is America In Decline?…Richard Lieber In The World Affairs Journal–Falling Upwards: Declinism, The Box Set
Repost-Lawrence Lessig At Bloggingheads: ‘Fixing Our Broken System?’…Conrad Black At The National Review: ‘Decline, But Not Inevitable Decline?’