The best head-start schooling possible, equitable employment
with an emphasis on real-work jobs, environmentally balanced
economic growth, participatory democracy, and guaranteed secu-
rity in retirement are five cornerstones to a well-blended society.
These cornerstones require governments to opt, on the one hand,
to influence the ‘transactors’, and the ‘transformers’ in principled
ways, by consulting and heeding those involved in local empow-
erment and multiplier processes. An accessory to all this is an
imperative: to clarify areas of central and local responsibility, enabling govern-
ment administrators to enhance their understanding of the role and strength of
local government while also enlarging on cooperation and consultation between
central and local government andthe business community. The objective is to put
regulations out to the places at which power is applied; to have less central gov-
ernment involvement; and to delegate subsidiary functions to local government- withal moving regulatory instruments away from formula controls to an ‘each
case judged on its merit’ basis. This emphasis, which reaches back through this
book to its opening pages, upholds human material needs in a growth context
which is also socially responsible and environmentally sound – the outcome being
an improved overall quality of living. To that end there has to be lessemphasis on
macro-corporatization, and moreemphasis on the pursuit of small business seed-
bedding. These, then, are the essential attitudinal and motivational planes of neo-
modern social understanding: the discourse, policy pursuit and design which a
triple harmony credo calls into being.
Why so? Well, simply put, open-ended consumerism which is
good for an economy in itself is seldom universally good for all
of society, because it puts harm in the path of future populations
and is degrading for the environment on which we all depend.
This is apparent and obvious. Ordinary people and politicians
alike are not daft, although they have on occasion allowed them-
selves to be seduced by the presumption that government, their
government, operates on a ‘contestable’ basis and that ‘corpora-
tization’ will reduce both transaction and transformer costs and
be of overall benefit. Of course there is already some success; but
the deep-seated social problems of unemployment, underem-
ployment and unemployability continue. Likewise, in being selec-
tive about environmental problems – saving an endangered
species here, ignoring an endangered city there – governments
degrade the wider setting in which their voters live. Yet ‘why not’
live for the enjoyment which economic growth can produce for
consumers ‘right now’? And ‘why’ address such issues as the vast number of com-
puter-literate unemployable, unassimilable toxins, nuclear wastes, and degraded
environments when these hard-basket issues can be simply dumped onto the next
generation?
The answer to questions of these kind is bound up with a rhetorical conun-
drum. ‘Why’ produce children? And, having produced them, ‘why’ educate them?
We, of course, produce offspring and educate them simply because we are mortal,
272 Practice
‘Many disparate types of
theorists have analysed
the nature of democratic
government, but virtually
all are agreed on one
point: a true democracy
requires a small society.’
Kirkpatrick Sale, 1998‘A[ny] regime which
provides human beings
no deep reasons to care
about one another
cannot long preserve its
legitimacy.’
Richard Sennett, 1998‘Liberal democracy
remains the only
coherent political
aspiration that spans
different regions and
cultures around the
globe.’
Francis Fukuyuma,
End Of History,1992