The ever-growing blob of city governments
Mark Moses is the author of The Municipal Financial Crisis: A Framework for Understanding and Fixing Government Budgeting. In this interview with National Review, he explains why Mission Creep is systemic in municipal governments, and how it empties city treasuries and leads to crummy services for taxpayers and residents.
I spent 30 years in and around local government, and nobody talked about this issue [of systemic scope creep]. And so the floating mission or the floating, nebulous scope was just an accepted reality of, oh, this is just the way we operate. We don’t pretend to delimit what we do or focus on what we do. We just keep it all open-ended.
And I think we’ve lost sight of what makes government different from a nonprofit or a commercial activity. And, you know, what is government? Government is the local authority empowered with the ability to legislate and enforce laws in a local jurisdiction. And that makes it good at some things, makes it good at defining property rights, protecting property rights at the local level, maybe crafting resolutions or regulations related to noise in certain areas. But it doesn’t make it good at central planning. It doesn’t make it good at commercial activities. It doesn’t make it good at what you might characterize as charitable activities. And I think people really misunderstand the extent of what those powers really are good for and where they stop.
And I kind of get it from the residents’ point of view. They want to get their “money’s worth” out of what they’re paying in taxes. So often they’ll bring problems to City Hall that City Hall is not necessarily good at fixing. But all that really does is propagate the idea that through this government legislative authority and enforcement authority, you can solve all problems, which is a complete misconception of how to best solve these problems when you wind up really monopolizing the activity.
When a budget manager sits down to prepare a budget, the revenues are just taken as a given. And it creates the perspective that anything the organization does, if just marginally, if five people are satisfied in an activity — doesn’t matter what it costs — that that’s success. Because the perspective isn’t that, oh, wait a minute, we’re extracting economic resources out of the local economy, whether from residents or from businesses. And so the perspective that anything we do that is positive to somebody is somehow successful is just part of what sustains the mode of scarcity, the mode of always scrambling to prioritize, because there’s only so much you can suck out of the local economy before you create other problems.
This is why I think alienation grows between the residents and business owners and the cities because think about what happens: If the city goal is to maximize services, and to do that it has to extract from the local economy, then the residents and business owners become the means to the ends of the government organization. So you get a complete flip in terms of who exists for whose sake. And I think that explains a lot of the alienation and a lot of the frustration.
This article originally appeared in the National Review. Read the whole thing here.
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