The Trouble With Government.(Review)

The Trouble With Government By Derek Bok Harvard University Press, 493 pages, $35

Why don't Americans like government? They want their Social Security checks, they want to protect the whooping cranes, and they support the minimum wage. They almost always reelect their senators and representatives. But when polled, the same Americans rank elected pols down among car salesmen and union bosses.

This bothers Derek Bok. In The Trouble With Government, the Harvard professor emeritus, famous as a defender of racial preferences, has come again to the defense of the administrative state. Americans, he says, "have come to depend on the State to meet so many of their needs." We aim for a level of security that "no society on earth has achieved without the active leadership of the State," yet have a "profound distrust of the federal establishment."

With such a suspicious frame of mind, Americans are unlikely to get the bold new social programs they seem to want. "Voters may be unwilling to accept additional taxes," Bok worries. Further, he says, all this suspicion might "eventually weaken the moral authority of the State," which would be even a worse thing, because the State "is the one administrative agency that can define, enunciate, and validate a set of common moral standards and obligations for all the people."

The core of this book is Bok's desire to make government work better so that we will quit bellyaching about it and accept more of it. He repeatedly compares us with other industrial welfare states, which have been so much better in seeing that every citizen has a doctor and every worker is in a union. Americans would have these things, too, if we weren't so suspicious of government.

What is the matter with us? Why did we reject the Clinton health plan? Why don't we have more government television channels, or pay "subsidies to make serious public-affairs programming more attractive to commercial producers"? Americans have a tradition, unfortunately still extant, of "individualism, the reliance on competition and the distrust of authority."

This tradition is embodied in our Constitution, which sets up a structure for a limited government. And this is not an efficient structure for the administrative state. Yet it is unlikely this structure will change. As Bok writes sarcastically, "To alter the Constitutional framework is to tamper with the sacred text." Not sacred to Derek Bok, apparently. In this book, the very word "sacred" has invisible quotation marks around it.