Question

Identify and discuss some paradoxes and contradictions in the public service heritage. Why are they significant? To what extent do they reflect the two underlying paradoxes discussed in this book’s introduction?

text book paradoxes:

One key conundrum, as obvious as it is ignored, is the paradox of democracy. Citizens have many civil rights in the conduct of public affairs (e.g., the freedoms of speech, elections, and assembly), but employees experience precious few such rights in organizations (e.g., subordinates seldom choose superiors). One part of American culture stresses individualism, diversity, equality, participation, and a suspicious attitude toward power, but another emphasizes conformity, uniformity, inequality, and submission to authority. In fact, the unity of opposites revealed by paradoxes is embedded in the human condition—birth and death, night and day, happiness and misery, good and evil, as each defines the other.

A related fundamental riddle is the A related fundamental riddle is the paradox of needs—individuals and organizations need one another, but human happiness and organizational rationality are as likely to conflict as they are to coincide. Many institutions today remain predicated on the machine model of yesteryear; indeed, the vast majority of them were created in the Machine Age of the industrial era. A top-down, command-and-control approach, revealed by the hierarchical organization chart, seeks to impose static predictability, demand efficiency, and expect self-sacrifice—the hallmarks of bureaucratization. But human beings, by definition, are premised not on a mechanical model but rather on an organic one. They are everything machines are not: dynamic, growing, spontaneous problem solvers. Thus, not only do people surrender their democratic liberties, but they also give them up to work in organizations quite unlike themselves. Human flourishing is no mean task in such conditions.

Answer 1

What if public provider made you extra selfish? It can be a counterintuitive inspiration, to be sure. President Barack Obama, after all, has promised to make public carrier 'a reason of my presidency' to aid get the nation back on its ft. He began matters off with a countrywide day of provider, and he has many different geared up packages on deck. Ironically, though, his notions of 'public' and of 'service' are each heavily dependable for the very selfishness he wishes to eradicate.

Accordingly, following his proposals would now not handiest fail to support the country - it could even make matters worse.

Obama's idea of "the general public" dates again to the French Revolution and was trendy a century in the past among mental elites similar to Woodrow Wilson, who viewed former notions of public service out of date. To unleash the energies of the American individuals in this type of tricky world, Wilson insisted, specialists in Washington wanted to coordinate them.

But that profound observer of early the us, Alexis de Tocqueville, knew higher. He had seen such centralized coordination of public provider in pre-progressive France, and was once conscious that it crippled any form of important public spirit. Why? In view that when the whole thing was run by way of "a strong foreigner called the government," Frenchmen noticed no want for community in any respect.

Provider was now not a normal a part of their everyday lives. Instead of assisting his neighbors when problems arose, the traditional Frenchman waited for government to scrub up the mess - and for this reason grew egocentric and individualistic. Why aid the homeless man down the road when there was a government program for that?

In distinction, Tocqueville used to be amazed by the vibrant public spirit in the usa, the place there was once no centralized public provider in any respect. An American believed that his city used to be his responsibility, and labored tough to make it better - not considering that of some airy devotion to "the general public," but on account that he had actual relationships together with his neighbors. These relationships have been both essential (due to the fact that there was once no government application to switch them) and practical.

A executive bureaucrat might have grand plans for solving the problems of mankind. But when compared with the normal citizen, he was powerless to furnish meaningful compassion to a real individual in need. Although the American township was once sometimes much less effective than the French forms, it made for higher public spirit, which Tocqueville believed worked better ultimately.

Although Wilson admired the public spirit of early america, he believed that the desires of the today's world required a new method. In contrast to Tocqueville, who inspiration a giant, various nation was too problematic for bureaucrats, Wilson inspiration it used to be too tricky for its residents. He wanted his fellow professors walking the whole country, instead than small groups of american citizens going for walks their little elements of it. Over the last century, america has had a chance to look who used to be correct - Tocqueville or Wilson.

Today, one other professor is president, and he believes the answer is Wilson. But despite a barrage of Wilsonian public provider programs from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, invoice Clinton and George W. Bush, the problems Obama identifies are generally the same problems Wilson saw - too little public spirit, and too little executive organizing it.

The solution, Obama believes, is taking those same packages and making them higher. He needs to broaden AmeriCorps from seventy five,000 to 250,000 staff, the Peace Corps to sixteen,000 and YouthBuild to 50,000. He wishes to revive President invoice Clinton's suggestion of giving tuition pupils a lessons spoil for participation in such applications, to reallocate 25 percent of labor-study cash to favor public-service jobs, and to expand excessive college carrier-studying packages.

But when these packages, in so many generations, have not solved the issues, why would they accomplish that now? Truely, Tocqueville was correct - public spiritedness is satisfactory fostered by means of actual responsibilities in a neighborhood neighborhood. Striking people in full-time govt packages sends the message that public provider isn't for everyone, and paying them defeats the whole thought of service.

Simply as in pre-revolutionary France, when executive forms replaces neighborhood commitment because the method of provider, carrier will decline. And when paid executive work is the measure of a good citizen, a lot more paid govt work will be needed.

Brian Brown is study accomplice in the center for American experiences at the Heritage foundation.