Transparency and the Internet

One of the many things that the President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act does is establish a web site called recovery.gov. The idea is that Americans can go online and see where every dollar from the Act is being spent. I think this is definitely a step in the right direction, but it falls substantially short of where governmental transparency should be.

Lack of transparency is one of the reasons we are in this economic mess in the first place. Not just in government but in major corporations that award themselves huge bonuses instead of pulling their companies out of bankruptcy. I'm not a proponent of completely unregulated capitalism but if you are bad at managing your company it should go bankrupt. You think that the economy would collapse otherwise? Look around... The economy is already crashing even after we bailed them out because they did not use the money effectively. I don't know why we thought they would be better at it this time around. One of the problems with this view is that we cannot bail out every company that is in trouble, especially in these hard economic times. You will inevitably end up choosing between those that deserve to keep their jobs and those that will see their companies fail along with all of its employees.

Money is only one aspect of transparency that the internet can help us with. With how rich many web sites are these days they provide one of the best ways to categorize information intuitively. Maybe one day this will help us not only understand where all of our money goes but also provide a quick and effective way of understanding the current social, political, and economic issues our government currently faces. Right now there is a thick fog that separates the ordinary US citizen and understanding how most legislation impacts them. Sure, some of this is due to a large amount of the population that just does not care, but I'm willing to bet that some of them don't care because that fog exists in the first place.