Faux Reform is the Enemy of Real Change

[Jim Ostrowski]

This fact is poorly understood.

All resources are scarce and that includes the time, energy and money that citizens have to devote to reform efforts. Also scarce are several intangible key resources: media and public attention and historical opportunity. The time for change has to be right. For example, the only time progress can be made on drug law reform is when we are at peace and the economy is doing fairly well.

So then, if citizens back a faux reform effort, this will "crowd out" support for other efforts, and will, in the short run, deter further efforts as unnecessary, and in the long run, will discourage future efforts as a waste of time since the prior effort turned out to be a failure after all.

For a detailed exploration of the concept of faux reform, see this post.

Another point. Reform of a bad system, e.g., Reagan rescuing Socialism Security, is worse than doing nothing. That is, reform merely keeps a bad system going longer.

Both locally and nationally, there have been in recent decades a myriad of reform efforts aimed at reducing the size of government.

All have failed!

Let's list a few.

1977 Crangle Machine defeated, loses mayor's office and council to "reformers."
1980 Reagan elected to get the government off our backs.
1994 Republican Revolution
1999 Reformer Giambra elected

And, over the years, locally, there have been various efforts to downsize city and county legislatures.

Each and every one of these reform efforts FAILED to make government smaller! In fact, government got bigger.

We must always focus on distinguishing between real change and faux reform and resist the facile trap of faux reform.

For a complete agenda of real change, see:

Free NY

12 point plan

[WNYresident]

We must always focus on distinguishing between real change and faux reform and resist the facile trap of faux reform.

One of the better things he has said in a long time.

Just like that BS when a government service group states "AND we saved you over (fill in bs here) this year" yet are cost of service goes up each year. Only savings that mean anything to me is when more is in my pocket each year not theirs.

[4music]

One of the better things he has said in a long time.

Just like that BS when a government service group states "AND we saved you over (fill in bs here) this year" yet are cost of service goes up each year. Only savings that mean anything to me is when more is in my pocket each year not theirs.

Well actually I do agree with what JO said about the faux change. The problem is that some union/group changes do save money but the savings are spent by the politicians, who hold the purse string, elsewhere and not always where taxpayers would prefer it.

I would love to see some real change and save taxpayer money too.

[buffy]

One of the better things he has said in a long time.

Just like that BS when a government service group states "AND we saved you over (fill in bs here) this year" yet are cost of service goes up each year. Only savings that mean anything to me is when more is in my pocket each year not theirs.

to me, faux reform includes caps on current spending.

we don't want caps we want reductions

[WNYresident]

That too.. we will put a cap of "blau percent" that we can grow the budget. It's still GROWING the budget..

[HipKat]

I like how Jim calls it Socialism Security! lol....

Good post, Jim, overall.