In the U.S., the public feedback loop is truncated. Every legislative idea is, of course, reviewed by interested parties (corporations, interest groups, academics) and often position papers are produced by those parties (although academics usually don’t more as quickly as the legislators so the opinions, data, and factoids offered by the interest groups are often more prominent than those of the nation’s scholars). The problem is the U.S. is that the process isn’t very transparent so many who might get excited about the conversation if they knew it was going on, never hear about the issue until all the important decisions have already been made.

Australia, New Zealand and our own Rulemaking procedures may offer a useful model for revising the legislative process to allow for meaningful pre-passage impact evaluations. Modern technology and a good model might get us all the way there.

I would suggest that members of Congress are no more fickle than Americans in general. The best evidence I’ve got to offer is the string of bad private-sector decisions that led Congress to even consider the cash for clunkers program. The reason the economy tanked is that private investors didn’t think through the implications of their decisions. Home buyers didn’t think. Mortgage bankers didn’t think. Financial advisors didn’t think. The list goes on and on. Congress is no more unthinking than the rest of us. And old saws aside, Congress behaves pretty much the way the rest of us do. As often as not, we Americans, including our representatives in Congress, make decisions from the gut, not the head.

Mark Twain used to kid that anything is possible in America so long as you are ignorant and confidence. But, the truth is that our national character has been carved from a history of risk taking by what the Irish call “chancers” who crossed oceans for the opportunity to try something new. Americans may actually be genetically engineered to be optimistically experimental. Seriously, somebody ought to a rigorous study of the immigration patterns and genetic selection mechanisms that created the current U.S. population – we were bred from generations of hope-inspired risk takers.

We are proud of the fact that we take decisive action. We admire those who dare to innovate and we understand that innovation entails making mistakes. Even at the beginning, America was philosophically predisposed toward taking chances. While the great principles of American democratic thought weren’t haphazardly thrown together, they did, and do, embody a liaise faire concept of decision making. The whole idea of the marketplace of ideas is that there will be successes AND failures and we will learn faster and grow stronger because we have dared to make mistakes. Mahatma Gandhi, a student of government who held the American system in high regard, believed “freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

Yes, our optimism gets the better of us sometimes. And yes, the rest of the world is generally more careful than we are (though the Chinese seem to have taken the American philosophy of quick production and rapid innovation to a new level). And no, we shouldn’t encourage our Congressmen or our children to make stupid mistakes. What we need, is to devise a means of allowing decisionmakers to make mistakes without being stupid about it.

Clear concise legislative impact statements could improve the public’s understanding of the issues and help improve the public discuss about what we ought to be doing. Of course how we, the people, choose to use such impact statements would make all the difference. If we were to continue to just push for quick decisive action (as is our predilection) the statements might not prove as useful as one would hope.

There are always people who will disagree with the dominant policy paradigm and who will work to undermine it – sometimes in direct and hostile ways, sometime in subtle, even passive ways. For the body politic and society in general, the more obvious the conflicts are better, healthier, than quiet, unnoticed, resistance. Unfortunately what we must guard against is the subtle stuff.

Philip K. Dick wrote in A Scanner Darkly: “If you want to bring down the establishment, don’t blow up buildings. Blowing up buildings lets them know that they have an enemy. It is better to chip away at the foundations a little at a time until the buildings fall.” I would submit that the “failure” of the Maryland Legislature isn’t a failure at all; it is a manifestation of a new mind-frame about the role of government. Nearly 30 years after the Reagan Revolution, it appears that New-Deal/Great-Society liberalism is crumbling. We, Liberals, thought we had survived the great assault. We saw some buildings blown up and thought the war was over. What we failed to notice was that our children, our fellow countrymen and, indeed, we ourselves had grown to accept the logic born from the seeds of the conservative Counter-Revolution. I call it the Counter-Revolution because it was designed to undo the principles of the American Revolution that are most important to our wellbeing as a society.

What the Counter-Revolutionaries have succeeded in doing is replacing the fundamental organizing principle of our society with a pale, shallow and largely meaningless concept. The Founding Fathers had maintained that “ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL AND ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH UNALIENABLE RIGHTS.” That idea, that equality is the original and preferred state of humanity was huge. The idea that there are human rights that cannot be taken and cannot even be given away was huge. But today, we talk about “freedom” not equality as the highest of political principles. When freedom becomes the benchmark those with power are justified in oppressing those without . . . all they are doing is maximizing their God-given freedom. When equality is the central political principle of a society, then government and the governed rightly focus on justice and balance – no man can become master and no man can be made slave.

Unfortunately, The Right has convinced us that freedom is more important than equality. The King of England had said so too; he maintained that it was just and right that he had more freedom than a commoner did because he deserved it. Eighteenth Century American Liberal realized that freedom can only be maximized for the majority of people when every person is guaranteed legal equality. American Liberalism was built around the idea that justice demands an acknowledgement of and respect for the inherent dignity of every individual. When “freedom” becomes more important that the grounding principle of “equality” we set the stage for neglect and excess — Maryland and Madoff.