The best government

A prior post on the public interest mentioned the role of government in the context of serving the public interest. One way to look at government is to see it as the means to balance public and private interests. The goal would be to find win-win scenarios or policies for both public and private interests, whenever possible. But, if a win-win cannot be found, government should be there to reasonably defend the public interest and strike a better balance than what we usually get now.

How big?

How big does government need to be to do that? A defensible, but unsatisfying, answer is that it needs to be just big enough to do its job and still be reasonably manageable and efficient. One could argue that California state government is too big to reasonably manage, just like the federal government. Arguably, state legislators and the governor cannot manage it very well, partly because of its size and complexity, partly because of chronic partisan fighting and partly because of corruption by special interest money.

Too big, too small or just right

There are dozens of California state agencies. It may be the case that some of them may not need to exist, while others might need to be expanded. For example, California state bank regulators mostly rubber stamp what federal regulators do. Given that, why maintain a shadow state agency when the public interest is defended by the federal function?

People may disagree about whether federal regulators did a good, bad or indifferent job in dealing with the economic 2008-2009 meltdown, but that is a different issue. Regardless, we pay one way or another for the federal service. If one considers the recent financial sector meltdown, nothing that state regulators did was of any more use than what federal agencies did. California state bank regulators would obviously beg to differ, to say the least.

Getting it right

From a pragmatic point of view, the best government would be one that is no bigger or smaller than what is needed to effectively do what the majority of people usually want. Of course, what people want is where the big disagreements are. Hard core conservatives generally want as little government as possible, but it isn't clear if their view of government would be sufficient to reasonably defend the public interest most of the time. The same appears to be true for hard core liberals, i.e., lots of government, but that doesn't translate into better service to the public interest.

When it comes to various California government functions, it is likely the case that a careful and even-handed review of state agencies and programs will show that sometimes the conservatives have it about right and sometimes the liberals have it about right. However, given the dismal state of affairs in California, it is easy to envision that they typically both have it more wrong than right.

If that weren't the case, then why are we in hot water? If Democrats and Republicans had done a good job, what went wrong? How did we get here? If you believe in American exceptionalism, then it is the case that America and California must have failed in their conduct of something. What might that something be? Failure in governance comes to mind. Who was responsible for that?