Common good Quote by Sarah Chayes

““In light of their views on the organization of society and political economy, Westerners, especially Americans, can be separated into two basic groups. One camp believes in the necessity, and the virtue, of government. People in this category tend to see governments, in whatever country, as essentially devoted to the common good—staffed by public servants, in the full sense of the term. Of course there are lapses; of course some officials are venal; but such cases are seen as exceptions. For this group of Westerners, the notion that an entire government might be transformed into what amounts to a criminal organization, that it might have entirely repurposed the mechanisms of state to serve its ends, is almost too conceptually challenging to contemplate. The other camp is characterized by suspicion of government. For people in this category, many of society’s problems can be blamed on an excess of government interference and regulation. Lack of development overseas is the inevitable result of a collectivist approach, including planned economies and state-run enterprises. Privatization and deregulation, in the view of this group, are key elements of the cure. For if left alone, freedom and the market will function to the greater good of all. The overwhelming evidence that the market liberalization, privatization, and structural adjustment programs the West imposed on developing countries in the 1990s have often helped catalyze kleptocratic networks—and may have actually exacerbated corruption, not reduced it—conflicts with this group’s orthodoxy, and so is hard to process. For most Westerners, in other words, seriously examining the nature and implications of acute corruption would imply a profound overhaul of their own founding mythologies.””

— Sarah Chayes