Why government doesn't work

In one of its occasional flings with anti-establishment thinking, the original "Star Trek" series featured homicidal space hippies who insult Capt. James T. Kirk by calling him "Herbert." He asks his science officer, Mr. Spock, what they mean. "Herbert was a minor official, notorious for his rigid and limited patterns of thought," Mr. Spock replies.

This exchange is of a piece of with classic 1960s philosophy. The idea was to set a new generation free of pointless restraints imposed by hidebound elders and let the creativity flow.

Almost four decades after this episode, called "The Way to Eden," aired, America is confronted with what the new thinking has wrought: levees and bridges collapsing; foreign interventions failing or bogging down; the celebrated geniuses of NASA finding themselves unable to prevent chunks of debris from imperiling space shuttles by damaging their heat shields.

Clearly, the explosion of out-of-the-box thinking in business and industry since that seminal time has benefited the U.S. economy and working people greatly. But what works in the corporate and small-business world does not necessarily work in government.

It's well documented that government service does not attract America's best and brightest, and even if it did, rigid application of the rules would remain essential. Government is not a business; it's a public service that loses credibility every time it engages in unfairness and inconsistency.

Yet stories of bureaucrats sabotaging public policy by wielding their own biases are rampant. Even a popular and visionary leader such as Gen. Colin Powell couldn't compel the State Department bureaucracy to put his ideas and principles into action. He would have been more effective if the department were populated with "Herberts," rather than with career civil servants who feel empowered to impose their own beliefs on their managers.

In his Washington Post op-ed "Can't-Do Nation," John McQuaid alternately blames big government, Bush administration incompetence, increasingly difficult problems and a national loss of self-confidence. More likely, the problem is the people in charge of government and educational institutions are relics of the 1960s who are applying a template that didn't work then and assuredly won't work now.

Soon enough, they'll be gone, having left their mark on the young people taught by their fellow travelers in academia. Ironically, the best hope for America may be a younger generation of civil servants who are as passionately rebellious as those who grew up during the 1960s, and just as ready to throw out their elders' failed ideas.