Central governments are often the definers and defenders of civilization. In a democracy, this requires government to step outside its representational bounds and act creatively with the resources at its disposal.
Free-society governments serve primarily as arbitrators of competing interests, or at least those interests with enough resources to make themselves heard. The arbitration function is another de facto check-and-balance system imposed on governments, and implicitly keeps governments’ attention on a multitude of sometimes-competing issues. There is a kind of free-economy parallel with this approach; that is, an implied acknowledgement that this way of doing things might be inefficient, but at least a lot of different “stuff” gets to be expressed. Besides, it’s the very soul of competition. May the best team win! Politicians favor this system because it gives them the most opportunity to do what they are most capable of doing, which is to exercise their own authority in bargaining among disputing interests.
Don’t we all get what we want under this system? Any individual issue has at least some chance to be heard, politicians are kept busy appeasing competing interests, and the spirit of competition is given more-or-less free reign. However, special interests, even acting en mass in all their diverse expressions, cannot represent a comprehensive, let alone balanced, cross section of the issues that need to be addressed by a healthy society. Their actions are even less likely to result in logical, structured analysis of problems and their interrelationships. We can’t assume that a collective good can come from this sort of system.
Worldwide competitive pressures and influences are increasing, in many economic sectors, and in fundamental ways such as competition for resources. Individual firms attempt to make the best of this situation, by serving emerging markets or devising strategies to meet increasing competition. No single firm however can be as effective as a concerted public-private partnership, starting with the national level, designed to address comprehensively issues such as maximizing national advantages, understanding emerging markets, managing fair trade issues, leveraging information and the combined forces of collaborating firms, and the like. However, instead of policies and actions driven by strategic decision-making, we have for the most part politically expedient, fragmented policies and a complete lack of overall vision about how to maximize our competitive position.
Reactive government is in some ways easier. It elevates the profile of elected representatives and allows them to “make up their own rules.” Elected leaders can also point to numerous examples of “government planning” gone awry. Communist and fascist regimes, in their own unique ways, have made people leery of an over-organized government presence. We did not design our own country’s experiments in federal planning (even at the minimal levels attempted) particularly well. The American landscape is peppered with the small failures of 19th-century utopian dreamers. As a result, in the federal government, especially, ad hoc policymaking is the current default operating mode.
On the other hand, government has proven it can mobilize toward a goal, as in the Apollo program, however ill-conceived it might have been from the standpoint of a long-term strategy. However, with no plan, leaders seeking to “make their mark” still contrive their own “strategic visions” and then feel free to pursue them, however reckless it may be, in the face of no alternative, sanctioned guidance.