November 28, 2006
Populism, New Jersey Style II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:45 AM EST I’m sure Joshua Zeitz is correct about the power of “local control” in New Jersey politics. Local interests are a big problem in American politics generally, because of the nature of American government. Congressmen and senators (and their state equivalents) are elected locally and have powerful political incentives to protect local interests (and bring home the bacon in terms of construction projects and other “pork”). This is much less a problem in parliamentary systems, because party discipline, which is very weak in American politics, keeps it under firm control. I’d be interested to know if there is an equivalent term in British politics for “pork.” I don’t know of it. Politicians are in the reelection business first and foremost (there’s a reason why John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage is a short book). So when local interests are likely to trump national or state interests, a means must be devised to protect politicians’ interests in getting reelected by deflecting responsibility.
On the federal level, military base closings have been handled by commissions making recommendations and then Congress having to accept or reject the commission’s findings as a whole. In New York State today, a commission that has been working in secret will reveal its recommendations for hospital closings and reorganizations. These recommendations will become law unless either the governor or the legislature objects before the end of the year. I don’t know the details of the New Jersey constitution (hey! I can’t know everything), but I presume something similar might be arranged. A commission (the membership of which would be made up of eminent citizens working with experts, not politicians), would work in secret to devise a scheme to change local government in that state from one basically suited to the eighteenth century to one suited to the twenty-first. Once its work was done, the recommendations would have to be either accepted or rejected as a whole, perhaps by referendum. If the savings made possible by economies of scale were substantial enough, voters might well be willing to sacrifice some degree of local control in order to get genuine property-tax relief. If the commission struck the right balance, such a scheme might work, even though the forces that benefit from the status quo would fight tooth-and-nail to maintain it. The trick, perhaps, is to gore everyone’s oxen at the same time.
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