That so many structures of a modern civilization have been destroyed by wildfires propelled and sustained by nature – and by human shortcomings – is a shameful embarrassment for the United States.
But the lesson to be learned from the human failures – failures of character and good judgment – are universal. They can be applied in every country because they lie at the heart of bad governance.
In 2012, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson wrote an impressive and well-received book, Why Nations Fail, on the origins of power, prosperity and poverty. In many ways, their theory of failure followed the recommendations of John Locke and Adam Smith to build institutions that embraces the ambitions, aspirations and well-being of individuals – politically and economically.
They credit good institutions with prosperity and bad institutions with poverty. Good institutions bring about virtuous circles of growth and individual agency from individual to individual. Bad institutions are elitist and extract rents from the economy and suppress growth and well-being. They concluded that “Rich nations are rich largely because they managed to develop inclusive institutions …[under which] wealth is not concentrated in the hands of a small group that could then use its economic might to increase its political power disproportionately.”
In California, wealth and political power are concentrated in an elite – Hollywood and high-tech, for short – that failed at the state, county and local levels to provide for water reservoirs, to have fire hydrants that worked and which ignored warnings from the National Weather Service of the risk of wildfires flourishing with an assist from strong winds. The budget for the fire department of Los Angeles was cut. There was no professional management of chaparral and other undergrowth in the hills to the north and east of downtown Los Angeles.
It has been widely commented in the American media that this California elite had “its own priorities,” elevating the importance of an idealistic environmentalism, higher salaries for those who work for government (rent extraction from the public at large) and enabling dependency among the homeless and those ill-prepared to take care of themselves.
To the contrary, the Caux Round Table Principles for Government advocate:
1. The civic order shall serve all those who accept the responsibilities of citizenship.
Public power constitutes a civic order for the safety and common good of its members. The civic order, as a moral order, protects and promotes the integrity, dignity and self-respect of its members in their capacity as citizens and therefore, avoid all measures, oppressive and other, whose tendency is to transform the citizen into a subject. The state shall protect, give legitimacy to or restore all those principles and institutions which sustain the moral integrity, self-respect and civic identity of the individual citizen and which also serve to inhibit processes of civic estrangement, dissolution of the civic bond and civic disaggregation. This effort by the civic order itself protects the citizen’s capacity to contribute to the well-being of the civic order.
4. Security of persons, individual liberty and ownership of property are the foundation for individual justice.
The civic order, through its instrumentalities, shall provide for the security of life, liberty and property for its citizens in order to insure domestic tranquility.
5. General welfare contemplates improving the well-being of individual citizens.
The state shall nurture and support all those social institutions most conducive to the free self-development and self-regard of the individual citizen. Public authority shall seek to avoid or to ameliorate conditions of life and work which deprive the individual citizen of dignity and self-regard or which permit powerful citizens to exploit the weak.
The state has a custodial responsibility to manage and conserve the material and other resources that sustain the present and future well-being of the community.
All our principles, including the full list of our Principles for Government, can be found here.