FORWARD
Thirty years ago, when I first wrote Theft at the Public Till , I was motivated by a profound sense of frustration—frustration with a political and eco- nomic system that seemed incapable of aligning its outcomes with the public good, and with a public culture increasingly unable (or unwilling) to discern that misalignment. What I argued then was simple but uncomfortable: our government—through policy drift, institutional inertia, and systemic mis- alignment—had become a mechanism not of collective uplift, but of quiet theft. Not theft in the tabloid sense of criminal scandal or corrupt officials pocketing bribes, but in the more insidious form of missed opportunities, skewed incentives, and hidden redistributions of wealth and power. These were thefts of time, trust, resources, and hope. And they were executed not by villains in back rooms, but by systems we all built—and continue to participate in. It would be easy to dismiss such an argument as dated, the rantings of a post–Cold War cynic trying to puncture the illusions of 1990s technocracy. But history has taken a cruel turn. The central thesis of this book has not been invalidated by the passage of time—it has been tragically confirmed. We live in an era where the legitimacy of institutions is in freefall, where faith in government has been supplanted by grievance and conspiracy, and where a new populism—raw, angry, and increasingly anti-democratic—is reshap- ing the political landscape in the United States and across the globe. The shock of Donald Trump’s 2016 election and his enduring grip on millions of Americans is not an aberration. It is a symptom. A symptom of a political
vii
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online