Government Has Less Unity of Purpose Than Any Corporation, and by Design

Anyone who has worked inside a large company knows the feeling. The mission statement says one thing. Sales wants another. Engineering is quietly building a third. Finance is blocking all three. The company nominally has a purpose, and on any given day a large fraction of its people are working at cross purposes to it and to each other, and the coordination overhead of getting them to pull in the same direction consumes most of management's attention.

That is a corporation: a body with a single owner, a single profit motive, a chief executive who can fire anyone, and a board that can fire the chief executive. If that organisation cannot achieve unity of purpose, consider what chance a government has.

Why Government Is Worse

Three reasons, in increasing order of importance.

Size. A government is larger than almost any company, and the coordination problem grows faster than the head count. Ministries do not know what other ministries are doing. Agencies duplicate and contradict one another. A policy announced at the top is reinterpreted at every level on the way down, and what reaches the citizen may bear little relation to what was decided.

Checks and balances. A corporation has one chain of command. A government is deliberately built with several, each with the power to obstruct the others: legislature against executive, courts against both, upper house against lower, states against the centre. Every one of these is a mechanism for preventing unified action. That is what it was built for.

The design serves the people in power. This is the point that is usually missed. The inability to make changes across the whole system is not an unfortunate side effect of the checks and balances. It is a feature that those already in power benefit from, because a system that cannot act coherently cannot act coherently against them. Incumbents of every kind, elected and appointed and commercial, are protected by a state that cannot bring its whole weight to bear on anything. The paralysis has a constituency, and the constituency is everyone currently doing well.

The Standard Defence

The defence of this arrangement is well known and partly right. Concentrated power does terrible things. The checks exist because unified governments with a single purpose have, historically, pursued that purpose into graves. A government that cannot do anything great also cannot do anything monstrous, and after the twentieth century that trade looked like a bargain.

I accept the history. What I do not accept is that the trade is the only one available, or that we have looked at what it costs.

What It Costs

Many of the deficiencies of representative government are this one deficiency wearing different clothes.

Why can it not manage a long-term problem, a pension system or a climate policy or an infrastructure programme that takes thirty years? Because no part of it can commit the whole, and the parts change every few years.

Why does it take a decade to build what a private firm builds in two? Because every stage passes through bodies whose interest is in stopping it, or in extracting something for letting it pass.

Why do reforms that most people want, and that have wanted for a generation, never arrive? Because a reform is a change across the system, and the system is built so that changes across it require the agreement of every part, and some part always loses.

Why does it lurch from one crisis response to the next rather than preventing the crisis? Because prevention is a unified act and response is a reactive one, and the machine can only do the second.

None of these is a failure of the people in office. Put a cabinet of geniuses in charge of a body designed not to have a single purpose and you get a body with no single purpose run by geniuses.

The Question That Follows

If the paralysis is the price of safety from tyranny, then the question is whether there is another way to buy that safety.

There is. The reason concentrated power is dangerous is that it is concentrated in few hands. A government with a unified purpose set by a handful of people is a dictatorship in waiting. A government with a unified purpose set by everyone is a different object entirely: it can act coherently, because the decision was taken once for the whole, and it cannot act against its population, because its population is the decider.

That is what direct decision on the great questions would buy. Not a stronger executive, which is the wrong remedy and the one every strongman proposes. A single point of decision that belongs to nobody in particular, so that the system can finally do something great without anyone having to be trusted with the power to do something terrible.

Until then we have what we have: an organisation that cannot agree with itself, defended as a virtue by exactly the people it protects.