Theft at the Public Till
existence. Nonpersonalized trust of this sort is discrepant from basic trust. There is a strong psychological need to find others to trust, but institution- ally organized personal connections are lacking, relative to pre-modern social situations. Routines which were previously part of everyday life or be- come drawn off and incorporated into abstract systems. Routines which are structured by abstract systems have an empty, unmoral character-this much is valid in the idea that the impersonal increasingly swamps the personal. Highly trained experts are not the sole repositories of such trust: it is also extended to relatively unskilled functionaries and suppliers of goods and services such as bus drivers, shopkeepers, garbage collectors, and po- licemen. Social integration depends on a normatively grounded belief and trust in social relations extending even to imagined communities of strang- ers with whom a social identification is claimed, but system integration involves a more mundane, prosaic, and profound trust in the often distant and anonymous representatives of technical and administrative systems. Government agencies often approach this problem as if descending a dangerous set of stairs. The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is sui- cide. Yet it is how most of our governmental decision makers act every day. Take debt. If we are wise, we borrow only to finance investment not to cover the monthly bills. Government muddles them up and borrows to cover both. No business would want to behave like that, nor would it be allowed to. Politicians have always and consistently resisted the pressure to do their accounts in a proper 'businesslike' way, arguing that it would tie their hands unnecessarily and that, one way or another, they have to finance both the running deficit and the capital expenditure by borrowing, so why separate them out artificially? The result is to distort priorities. There is no incentive to think long-term. There is no way to trade an expenditure today against savings or benefits in the future because we can't sort out the numbers.
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