Theft at the Public Till
to produce high prices, poor service, slow innovation, and entrenched arro- gance. And because government monopolies are notoriously careless about their customers’ welfare, they arouse ill will among the public, weakening government still further. The problems arise when the government leaves the support of true in- dividual facts and begins to operate on the basis of abstract principles. By ig- noring necessary details, the government ensures that its abstract principles are never adequate to the precise realities of any particular case. Very often, in fact, the degree to which legal solutions fail to satisfy the complexities of a given incident is a fair measure of how far away from the facts the govern- ment has strayed, how far out it has become, and how badly it has overused its abstract capabilities to the detriment of fact-based wisdom. Think how many outdated laws are still on the books and how many tired prejudices still linger in the halls of justice. Our government’s failure to adjust to today’s conditions is the source of much of its accountability problems.
3. Technologies.
The dynamic forces driving American companies to change have been exacerbated by the unprecedented revolution in information technologies over the past several decades. Impressive changes in computing power and new communication devices have changed the way America works. These changes are harbingers of a larger trend in the decade ahead. There will be senior executives in organizations who leverage the growing anytime/ anyplace infrastructure to effectively guide their organizations while more or less constantly traveling. The surprise behind this is that telecommuni- cations will not substitute for transportation-we will not abandon aircraft for teleconference rooms. In fact, quite the opposite will occur, an extension of a century-old trend. Increased telecommunications leads to an increased demand for transportation and vice versa, for the two are mutually rein- forcing. Talking regularly with executives in, say, Tokyo will lead inevitably to a trip to Tokyo, and the contacts made on the trip will lead to further demand for telecommunications, and so on. Nomadic executives will be a
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