199.
Local initiatives and the elected mayor[i]
Banks
are moored in system tragedy, in a web of mutual dependencies, shared thought
and habits that it is difficult to change from the inside. That is due, in
part, also elsewhere in business, to managers sitting on each other’s
supervisory boards, allowing others the games they play themselves, and confirming
each other in a world view that is distancing itself from society. They have
the nerve to claim increases of remuneration for work that they see as excellent
but in fact has driven society into calamity.
Governments
are hardly able to intervene and change the system, because they are themselves
too close, too involved in it, in revolving-door employment between government
and banks, in market ideology, in needing banks for the system to work, and in
keeping banks from taking their jobs abroad.
If
a system cannot change itself from within, sooner or later people will no
longer tolerate it and will seek recourse in new forms outside the system. We
see that happening now.
Fed
up with the big banks, people are turning away. They seek recourse in crowd-funding
or direct contacts between local providers of capital and entrepreneurs. Average
profit may be smaller there than in larger markets, since capital providers are
fishing in a smaller pond, but in compensation of that risk is also lower due
to personal relationships and local reputation systems.
This
fits in a broader pattern of decentralization to local initiatives and responsibilities,
in health care, for example. Some governments stimulate it, according to a
renewed interest in local communities, self-help, and ‘the Big Society’, though
there are suspicions that this is a ploy for reducing expenditure rather than
improving society.
This
development leads to differences between localities in access to services and
subsequently also to well-being and prosperity. That is already invoking
protest. Yet a new movement seems taking place that will step across. We are on
our way to a new diversity where equality of access arises locally but no
longer nationally.
Another
question is whether this development may not lead to local clientism, where
local bobo’s gather too much power and influence. It may also add momentum to
the encroachment of criminals on local government.
There
is an increasing tendency to favour an elected mayor instead of a state
appointed one. In the Netherlands a law is before parliament to give room for
it. That seems in line with the trend towards local initiative and
responsibility. However, an elected mayor might stimulate local cronyism, and
perhaps it is better not to go for it. An above-local, national task remains to
monitor and prevent local conditions of cronyism, and appointment of mayors may
be part of that.
[i] This
item is based on an article that I published with Gert Jan Kats in the Dutch newspaper
Reformatorisch Dagblad, on 2 May
2015.