MISSOURI WATCH: DOES OUR GOVERNMENT WORK?

You know, fellow citizens, if we only knew what we were doing, we might know how well we were doing it and, heaven forbid, if it's necessary to keep on doing it.

If this appears to be some Buddhist aphorism designed to confuse the Western mind, forget it. The need to know what we're doing, and how it's working out, is really a basic tenet of representative government or, if you will, democracy.

The idea of governors doing the will of the governed has been around a long time. Some believe it started with Plato and Aristotle, before the time of Christ, but others, like historian Will Durant, believe the concept came from Oriental cultures. Never mind, the idea is more important than genealogy.

What's important is that something like this concept was made a part of the Magna Carta, which in turn influenced the men who wrote our Constitution, which in turn became the guiding mantra of America right up to this very moment.

We truly believe that our governors are charged with serving the governed, the latter being us, and the former being the politicians who swarm around our capitals in Washington and Jefferson City, where new ideas are hardly No. 1 on the list of priorities these days.

The idea of knowing how well our government is doing is theoretically up for grabs every time we go to the polls to elect mayors, sheriffs, legislators, governors and members of Congress. If you have ever, accidentally or purposefully, read the first constitution of the Continental Congress, you begin to realize this concept of meeting the needs of a deserving public runs throughout the document, and the way it was first envisioned is, indeed, a brilliant blueprint that hopefully is being understood more and more around our world.

The irony is that as this Anglo-American concept spreads to countries that previously embraced vastly different forms of government, it is becoming less and less a part of the political climate here in America. Elections are now held to ascertain which candidate can more completely monopolize the image business, all done with donated dollars and all spent on television commercials with the sole intent of doing as little of the work of democracy as the voters will tolerate.

So, if elections have lost their meaning, and if those we elect have no intention of changing anything while pursuing the goal of staying in office or winning a still higher office, what chance do the governed have of knowing how well their governments are being run and what the prospects are for improving their performance? The answer to that seems obvious.

The above question came to mind the other day when I was looking over the Truly Agreed and appropriation bills of the State of Missouri for the next fiscal year that begins July 1. These are remarkable bills, hammered together first by the requesting agency and then studied, debated and eventually enacted by our elected representatives in Jefferson City. This is the way it's supposed to work, and some would say it's working just as intended. It seems logical, but the problem is in the details.

And the details are somewhat different than the philosophy. For example, the legislators who went home a few days ago allocated more than one-half billion dollars to run the state's corrections system. The people who run this agency, by the way, are superb. Maybe half a billion taxpayer dollars doesn't sound like a lot of money these days, but I am old enough to remember when the entire government of Missouri cost less.

We have doubled expenditures for prisons and parole and probation systems in this decade because this is a rational response to frightening, horrifying crime rates. Is there anyone among us, including those who proposed and those who approved these expenditures, have any idea whether the amount of taxpayer cash we have spent on corrections has really done any good? Some would say that we have to keep criminals behind bars, and they're right, of course, but how much actual protection has been afforded by the billions of Missouri money that have been spent this decade on new prisons and people to run them?

I don't know, and the people who have approved these billions of dollars don't know, and I will guarantee that the people who will discuss the state's crime rate during the upcoming campaign don't know either. The tragedy is that once we place a public program in place, it takes on a life of its own that then must be continued and perpetuated ad infinitum.

Both our state and federal governments have adopted programs that are no more effective than if they didn't exist. They are funded and perpetuated because they become a part of a budget that is routinely accepted, debated and approved by appointed and elective officials who have as their overriding concern their own perpetuation in this uncreative way of governing so pervasive that new ideas are the political system. Indeed, this uncreative way of governing millions of people has become so pervasive that new ideas are often introduced not through a public forum but in the budget process. A state agency whose leaders have any smarts at all recognizes that the essential step to success of any idea, however good or bad, rests within the budget process. Once it is accepted in this process, it becomes as permanent as the granite in our state Capitol.

It is bad enough that taxpayers have no idea whether the money they are sending to Jefferson City or Washington is financing programs that work, but it is even worse that those we elect to perform this task have no idea either. I suspect that General Motors or Ford would last about a year before taking bankruptcy under such a system. Believe me, the people who run profitable corporations knew exactly what works and whether the money they're spending for them is worth it.

Shouldn't our governments be as well run, and more importantly, are we stuck ad infinitum with political ad hominem?

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.