David Brooks weighs in this morning with a succinct explanation for ?how liberalism immobilized itself.?
Education reformers have been talking for years about the suffocating effect of public school pension costs. (See Hess and Osberg's Stretching the School Dollar or Michael Podgursky and Robert Costrell in Education Next.)
Brooks expands the argument to government in general:
Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct toward unproductive ones.
He notes, for instance, that California now spends more on prisons than schools, that Buffalo has as many public employees today as it did with half the population.
The bad guy, not surprisingly, are?public sector unions. And Brooks quotes George Meany here: ?it is impossible to argue collectively with government.?
The kind of paralysis that Madison and his colleagues envisioned when they created our system of government did not, unfortunately, envision the current circumstance: when government would be, for better and worse, the lifeblood of the nation.
?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
