Theft at the Public Till
will be more directed. Instead of directing complaints through organiza- tions like governments and unions that have permanent institutionalized mechanisms for negotiations and settlements, workers and consumers will have to act directly. The result will be more lawsuits, lower levels of worker loyalty, and diminishing confidence in businesses.
2. The quest to ascribe responsibility.
Americans want more direct accountability by someone, anyone. They hold their institutions, their government, and their employers up to a stan- dard of scrutiny and accountability that escalates every year. This quest for accountability shows up as grass roots politicking, talk-show democracy, “throw-the-bums out” politics, and shareholder revolts. In the business realm, companies now have to be more responsive to the demands of a more aggressive group of shareholders. Over the past forty years, institutional investors, primarily pension funds, have increased their share of all equities outstanding from 13 percent to more than 60 percent. The institutional investors are using this financial clout to put constraints on the control and authority of the chief executive of fibers of firms and to make them more responsible to shareholders and boards of directors. This means that companies have another constraint on their freedom and their ability to re- spond quickly to other incentives. In the public realm where there is no one group with the identified clout of institutional investors in the private realm, Americans keep asking how governmental programs claim to actually meet their supposed goals. Voters want answers but fail to get them. One of the main sources of this malaise is an awareness of the ineffi- ciency of governmental regulation in such fields as environmental protec- tion. In the late 1960’s, environmental impact statements were invented to control the harmful effects on the natural environment of power plant and factory smokestacks, industrial wastes, real estate development projects, and the like. Public and private agencies whose actions might plausibly injure the environment were required, under state and federal laws and regulations, to file assessments of the probable environmental impacts of their actions and
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