| Chapter 1: | Democracy without Politics? Hidden Costs of Corruption and Reform in America |
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government “run like a business”—a theme that, for better and worse, has long been part of our reform tradition. As we watch the ways governments use our resources, we insist on getting value for money—and our reform movements, while often raising the banners of justice and the good society, have been much more focused upon accounting and administrative controls.
Not surprisingly, we would-be individualists like our power dispersed and divided rather than extensively controlled by any one person or group. In a passage that I will argue later has come to be misunderstood, Madison put it thus in Federalist 51:
Few of us are willing to have our liberties limited for very long; as a consequence we have tended to support just enough government—institutions and officials able to do the basics without extensive monitoring by, or resources from, ourselves, yet not powerful enough to limit our private lives.
Sooner or later, moralism and individualism end up in conflict. We hold others to strict standards—particularly those we perceive as powerful and as distant from our lives22—yet wish to be free to act ourselves, often with relatively little regard for the greater good. That, we usually imagine, will be safeguarded in the economic and political marketplaces by the workings of some hidden hand, despite the fact that individualistic go-getters who resist any sort of overriding moral consensus will more or less inevitably end up trampling on each others' conceptions of the good. We are quick to demand remedies for corruption but as individualists are more likely to focus on “bad apples”—for example, the former governor of Illinois—rather than upon deeper origins of corruption or upon our