Franklin Foer

I actually was pretty surprised over the course of doing this.

There were parts of the government that I didn't know existed.

You know, I didn't understand the way in which the government was constantly making investments in human capital.

You can't walk in off the street and know how to do a lot of government jobs because they're esoteric or they're filling a void.

And so the government has all of these improvised processes for helping people get better at what they do.

And so as I was thinking about this, this simple fact kind of dawned on me that when you're pushing somebody out of the government or you're firing them or you're forcing them to retire, you're not just losing an expert.

You're losing all this investment that the taxpayer had made in the development of that expertise.

we stop hiring friends of the party in power to do the work of government.

And we start seeking out people who are actually equipped to do these problems.

We get rid of the patronage system and the civil service starts to grow and it starts to hire all these experts, whether they are economists or lawyers or scientists.

And they start to do these things that, that make American life less harmful.

They start to make sure that the drugs are,

aren't toxic, that we're actually measuring things in an accurate sort of way so we can make good predictions about the weather or about the future of the labor market.

And all of these things help America expand as a country and help us become an economic power.

We don't think of the government as a pillar of our national strength, but we were only able to

break through in this sort of way that we broke through as a country in the 20th century because we had a government that had capacity and that people trusted.

The world likes to deposit its money in the American banking system because they trust the people who regulate that banking system.

I think that it really starts in the earliest decades of the 20th century where these concepts are starting to get embedded.

And then, of course, it kind of explodes ultimately during the wars that we fight and especially World War II and then the aftermath of World War II when we had the Cold War and the extension of a lot of government.

I remember as a child watching everything unfold on a black and white television.