In business, politics, and things in between, a trendy catchphrase has arisen. Most notably recently, Georgia state Rep. Mesha Mainor (D) has been dropping the line in explaining why three years was enough of the Democratic Party for her, and why a black urban leader like herself, a mother with two daughters who cares about their future in America, would join what many in her western Atlanta community consider the enemy: the Republicans.
“It’s been much easier with the Republican Party on certain issues, and those issues are education, public safety, and putting people over systems,” she told Fox News not long after her switch in July. “So I changed parties not really because of the party itself but more because of the policy.”
Defunding the police, thus endangering law-abiding black families, and forcing poor black parents to accept dead-end public schools that offer no way out of poverty and crime, are among the policies that form the system that Mainor’s party had become—which, like an indestructible machine locked into its impersonal programming, doesn’t pity the multitudes whose lives it tramples.
Persons versus the rulebook, or the faceless bureaucracy, is nothing new, of course. Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 in no small part because of the “Putting People First” economic plan his campaign distributed far and wide, dozens of pages long. (Although its primary proposal—cutting middle class taxes—never materialized during Clinton’s eight years in office.)
The matter of people versus systems is also at the forefront of business management strategy. For instance, the Palo Alto-based Leansummits customer-focused management consulting firm cautions its clients that “prioritizing people over systems is one of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make to achieve high productivity.” Instead, they should be “providing a robust system to people who have clarity about the processes and roles [because] when you put systems first, you’re uplifting all the people within the organization instead of a few.” Leansummits drill clients in disciplines like the Pomodoro Method of brief, set periods for huddle-style meetings.
Even Pope Francis’s decidedly nontraditional approach has been described as “people over systems,” with his unexpected choice for archbishop of Paris a few years ago, for example, sounding in an interview remarkably like a CEO: “I am thinking of how I can reduce time in meetings and spend more time in the field.”
During the Clinton administration, with the Cold War over and lots of chatter in Washington about the “peace dividend,” Deputy Defense Secretary John M. Deutch defended the scandal of underpaid military personnel on food stamps with the explanation that “money is tight and we are choosing people over systems … if we must delay chemical lasers in space in favor of housing for our enlisted people, [then-secretary of defense William] Perry and I will do so.”
However the maxim/slogan is used or misused, it would be hard to find a more compelling description of what is at stake in the protracted struggle between free individuals and the metastasizing socialism of ever-more-intrusive big government. Those seeking votes so they can turn the ship of state around as it speeds toward the precipice would be wise to adopt the phrase as their own, like Mesha Mainor.
The algorithms behind Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden story shortly before the 2020 election were a system (if that indeed is the accurate explanation of what happened.) Government’s oftentimes-illogical response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a system that had been largely formulated decades before it was allowed to kick in, with those questioning it condemned as troublemakers and kooks; yet last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention internally investigated and last year finally admitted its system’s defectiveness.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “system” as “a group or set of related or associated things perceived or thought of as a unity or complex whole.” The key word is “complex.” When people think of a system, they think of a bureaucracy, where complexity comes with the territory, and getting satisfactorily served is against the odds. When people, on the other hand, are taken care of by a professional waiter at a good restaurant, they think not of a system but of people, in that case a person listening to you tell him what you want to eat and serving it to you swiftly and accurately; there’s nothing complex in that.
Once upon a time McDonald’s had an agonizing paper slip system for those seeking special orders, and even with that the fast-food giant considered it sacrilege to serve a Filet-O-Fish with Big Mac sauce substituted for the tartar sauce, and refused to do it. Competitor Burger King’s “Have It Your Way” policy forced it to relent; before COVID, McDonald’s had become so your-way-friendly it was even serving breakfast all day.
Governmental bureaucratic systems may respond to the people electing someone new at the top, but almost always the system resists, and keeps growing. After taking the oath of office in 1981, Ronald Reagan famously declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” And yet far from seriously trying to shut the two new cabinet agencies established by his immediate predecessor, the Department of Education and the Department of Energy, he actually established a new one, the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Socialist central planning, in which the absence of market prices dictates that resources berationed by bureaucrats, was aptly described by Churchill as “queuetopia.” Just as Russians under communism stood on long lines for bread, Englishmen and women today suffer months-long queuing for major surgeries under Britain’s socialist National Health Service, a 75-year-old system that seems politically untouchable.
This may be the main lesson. People balk at departing from government dependency even when they suffer under the systems to which they are well-used. The only way to show them they are better off taking the leap is through free competition. Successful restaurants hire good waiters because they know their customers can eat elsewhere. State Rep. Mainor chose the competition, the other party, because she knew so much more was in the balance for her constituents—and her daughters—than the enjoyment of a good meal.
