The authors say that the most ossified, sclerotic sectors of American life -- politics and government -- are about to be blown up by new capabilities, especially the Internet, and the public's wholesome impatience that is encouraged by them.
More. Faster. Please?
"Think of any customer experience that has made you wince or kick the cat. What jumps to mind? Waiting in multiple lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Observing the bureaucratic sloth and lowest-common-denominator performance of public schools, especially in big cities. Getting ritually humiliated going through airport security. Trying desperately to understand your doctor bills. Navigating the permitting process at your local city hall. Wasting a day at home while the gas man fails to show up.
These guys are onto something!
Whatever you come up with, chances are good that the culprit is either a direct government monopoly (as in the providers of K-12 education) or a heavily regulated industry or utility where the government is the largest player (as in health care)."
In the 1950s, A&P supermarkets (remember them? You probably don't) had a 75 percent market share. What used to be the General Motors Building near Central Park South has an Apple store where the automobile showroom once was. When Kodak loses customers, it withers.
I actually remember my Mom shopping at the A&P.
But when government fails, it expands even faster. This is, Gillespie and Welch say, because "politics is a lagging indicator of change," a sector of top-down traditions increasingly out of step with today's "bottom-up business and culture."
Also because of the tendency to throw even more of somebody else's money at the problem. Except NASA.
A generation that has grown up with the Internet "has essentially been raised libertarian," swimming in markets, which are choices among competing alternatives.
And the left weeps.
Preaching what has been called nostalgianomics, liberals mourn the passing of the days when there was one phone company, three car companies, three television networks, and an airline cartel, and big labor and big business were cozy with big government.
And two newspapers - one in New York and once in D.C. - not a zillion bloggers. Even HuffPo is a 'big blogger'.
More importantly, when all the rest of the newspapers and the big three evening news programs all followed the lead of the one newspaper in New York...
When the Census offered people the choice of checking the "multiracial" category, Maxine Waters, then chairing the Congressional Black Caucus, was indignant: "Letting individuals opt out of the current categories just blurs everything."
You can't be both black and white, you gotta be one or the other!
This is the voice of reactionary liberalism: No blurring, no changes, no escape from old categories, spin the world back to the 1950s.
"Declaration of Independents" is suitable reading for this summer of debt-ceiling debate, which has been a proxy for a bigger debate, which is about nothing less than this: What should be the nature of the American regime? America is moving in the libertarians' direction not because they have won an argument but because government and the sectors it dominates have made themselves ludicrous.
So The One will ultimately accelerate the change to libertarian? How ironic! I hope so.
The essence of which is the common-sensical principle that before government interferes with the freedom of the individual and of individuals making consensual transactions in markets, it ought to have a defensible reason for doing so.
It usually does not.