No Easy Answers

James Q. Wilson on bureaucracy, crime, and community

William D. Eggers & John O'Leary from the February 1995 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

But for other people, the group homes will be very attractive. Better than the life they now lead. I am not asserting that this proposal will reduce illegitimacy dramatically. I'm saying that I think it will give the children that are the fruits of these illicit unions a better start, and that by giving them a better start and keeping them off the mean streets for five or 10 years, they will be less likely to have illegitimate children of their own. I'm betting that it's a successful second-generation strategy to reduce illegitimacy by training a generation of children that illegitimacy is morally unacceptable. Among the messages being delivered is that it's wrong.

Do I know if any of this will work? No. But it's something that can be assessed.

Reason: You've advocated using nonprofit organizations to deliver these services. Won't this turn once-independent nonprofits into virtual appendages of the state?

Wilson: The key to this question has to do with the terms and contract. It makes sense to use private contractors and nonprofits if the contracts are performance-based. The government says, "Look, we want the following outcome. If you think you can achieve that outcome at the price we're willing to pay, we'll give you a contract." A payoff follows performance.

There are real difficulties, though, with quantifying performance and terms of a contract. If I knew the answer I'd be able to retire. I'm pessimistic that much can be done about the crime problem for exactly this reason. We all know how to evaluate successful families. We do it all the time. We look at our neighbors and say the Joneses are a good family and the Smiths are doing terrible. That's a global judgment based on our perception of a wide range of factors--how the kids behave, how often the parents fight. The difficulty is putting that into contractual language.

Reason: Can we go back to an America where aid is primarily based on true voluntary self-help?

Wilson: We need to use government because there are simply too many children around for private charities to do the job. I'm trying to think of the least harmful way to structure this, but unfortunately I cannot think of a way of doing it without a good deal of public money.

We can't go back. The kinds of problems we are talking about are of an order of magnitude different even in my lifetime. We once had skid rows, and the Salvation Army took care of skid row. And that was a terrific arrangement. If that were our problem today, I would be in favor of a similar arrangement. But now we have 50,000 to 100,000 crack babies being born every year. We have millions of illegitimate children. This is a totally new phenomenon, both here and abroad. I don't see how we can cope with these problems with the resources available in the private sector. I don't think that by having these relationships between government and private agencies, we destroy the spirit of voluntarism. I think the spirit of voluntarism is as strong as it has ever been.

Reason: What is government in America going to look like in the next century?

Wilson: It's going to be bigger, more complicated, more burdensome, and more costly. No matter what point in human history you ask that question, the answer is always the same. Government gets bigger. In the United States, however, I think we may be more adept at minimizing those burdens in part because of our constitutional system, which makes it fairly easy for people to contest a burden.

I'm more optimistic about the long-term prognosis here than in Sweden or England or Germany. The changes in local government--state-level tax cuts, privatization, downsizing--are all wonderful things. They are examples of the virtues of our system of government. If the central government ran our local governments, there wouldn't be any privatizing, there wouldn't be any cutting back. That's because local
governments must stand on their own fiscal feet and be responsible to the taxpayers. I think these good things will continue to happen unless the federal government finally persuades us to allow it to fund local operations.

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