We Don’t Hate Government. We Hate Waste.

A Prescription for the Dysfunction

Somewhere along the line, we stopped building government for the people and started building it for bureaucracy. If you’re reading this from Ohio, look around: do we really need 88 counties, over 1,300 townships, 926 municipalities, 611 school districts, 130+ separate court systems, and five different systems to manage voter rolls? The answer is no.

This isn’t a partisan issue. It’s a logistics one. And it’s not just an Ohio problem. It’s an American one.

Government on Autopilot

Most of the infrastructure of government in Ohio was designed when travel was by horse, communication was by telegraph, and cities ended where the trolley tracks stopped. We haven’t redrawn our counties to reflect modern population centers, consolidated duplicated services, or standardized digital infrastructure.

Yet we expect this outdated system to manage 21st-century challenges: a mobile workforce, regional economies, AI, cybersecurity threats, and climate change.

Meanwhile, private companies like Tyler Technologies ^[1], OpenGov ^[2], NextRequest ^[3] (from CivicPlus ^[4]), and BoardDocs ^[5] have figured out how to make millions off public institutions. We don’t own our tools, we rent them back at a premium with our data held hostage.

What Other Places Are Doing Better

• Unified Courts: Indiana’s Odyssey case management system ^[6], run by the state judicial branch, covers most counties. Other states with unified or integrated systems include California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Vermont, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, Arizona, and Wisconsin. These systems centralize administration and often share a statewide filing portal, unlike Ohio where each court is its own fiefdom, paying for yet more duplication..
• Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV): Used statewide in Maine and Alaska ^[7]. It eliminates spoiler candidates and encourages civility. New York City uses it for local elections. In America, the land of infinite choices, most of the time, we’re choosing between Coke or Pepsi- when we really want a milkshake.
• If we can’t do RCV- Jungle Primaries: Formerly used in California and Washington, nonpartisan top-two primaries. All voters participate, and the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, go to the general. It gives independents a voice and breaks the partisan chokehold.
• Election Matching Platforms: Sites like ISideWith ^[8] and tools like VoteSmart ^[9] show how voter-candidate alignment could work. What if these were built into a public, state-run voter guide with mandatory candidate participation?
• Open Source Government Software: Germany mandates open source for public systems. France has a national government cloud. Estonia leads the world in digital government ^[10]with universal IDs, e-voting, and public service access portals.
• Voting Access Reform: Some countries and U.S. states mail every registered voter a ballot. Others make Election Day a holiday. Either would be better than forcing people to queue up on a workday in November. We need to make it easier to vote, and easier to register- in fact, registration should be part of a complete digital government platform (see above).
• Participatory Budgeting ^[11]: Cities like Paris, New York, and Boston give citizens real voting power on how public dollars are spent. We should mandate this for at least a portion of discretionary budgets.
• Citizen Feedback Systems ^[12]: Governments in Buenos Aires and Seoul use live citizen dashboards and mobile apps to track satisfaction and performance. Imagine every department rated like a ride-share driver—real accountability.

What We Need to Build

• Align Economic Incentives With People, Not Power Plays: For decades, governments have handed out tax breaks, land deals, and incentives to private companies under the banner of “economic development.” But too often, these deals hurt the public more than they help. In Dayton, a paint line was built for GM in exchange for a 20-year commitment. When the agreement expired, GM closed the plant. The facility was handed over to a private developer, Industrial Realty Group ^[13], who “white-boxed” the building and profited again when a low-wage glass plant moved in. The taxpayers paid twice, and the community lost high-paying jobs and long-term stability. We need to end Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts which give collected tax dollars back to the property owners, Joint Economic Development Districts (JEDD) are another scam which allows multiple jurisdictions to tax areas that they normally wouldn’t be able to tax to subsidize big business, and “Special Improvement Districts” are yet another way that government gives preferential treatment to one group of property/business owners. We need to get government out of “economic development” altogether.

This isn’t development. It’s exploitation.

Let’s establish a “Walk to Work” Tax Credit ^[14] that’s simple and smart: the closer a worker lives to their job, the higher the credit. This flips the incentive structure. Instead of subsidizing sprawl, it rewards proximity, community, and sustainability. It encourages employers to invest in safer neighborhoods, greener infrastructure, and stronger local economies. And when communities are well-run, efficient, and supported by an educated, trained, and healthy workforce, it makes location decisions easier, for businesses that care about long-term success. It’s universal, and it doesn’t matter how big or small your business is.

How about a ban on jurisdictional poaching, where cities or counties lure companies away from neighboring communities with incentives, and an end to the practice of picking winners and losers in the private sector. These deals are a gateway to corruption, especially when paired with opaque donor networks and political patronage. In Dayton, we saw Reynolds and Reynolds move to Kettering with subsidies and NCR abandon its home for Georgia. This is corporate welfare, nothing else.

Even with real-time donor registration and reporting (covered later) and recusal rules in place, we can’t afford to keep subsidizing short-term optics at the cost of long-term prosperity. Public investment should serve the public good—not the revolving door between campaign donors and city hall.

• Public Utilities Must Serve the Public: Deregulation has not delivered the promised competition or savings—it’s invited corruption. The House Bill 6 scandal involving former Speaker Larry Householder ^[15] exposed a rotten core where utility companies could buy legislation to gut oversight and push bailouts. Public utilities should be publicly owned, transparently operated, and accountable to ratepayers, not shareholders or lobbyists. Essential services like electricity, water, and broadband should never be for-profit monopolies.
• Registered Donor Conflict Tracking: Every vote taken by an elected official should automatically be cross-checked with a real-time donor database. If a contractor, developer, or lobbying interest has donated to them—or to their family PAC—they should be forced to recuse themselves from voting. This system would be fully integrated into the election platform and legislative calendars, ending silent pay-to-play politics and exposing patterns of influence. And if too many politicians on the board have been donated to by a company, it should be disqualified from bidding.
• Public Financing from Public Savings: With consolidation and smart digital infrastructure, we could free up massive administrative overhead. Those savings should fund public campaign financing—eliminating the biggest barrier to ordinary people running for office. If we cut bureaucracy, we can afford democracy.
• Universal Healthcare Is Infrastructure: A modern nation can’t function if its people fear getting sick. Employer-based insurance holds back small business, forces people to stay in bad jobs, and fuels medical bankruptcies. No elected official or public employee should receive health care unless their constituents do. We need a public system that rewards care, not coding. Our current model isn’t just unjust, it’s inefficient, wasteful, and unsustainable. Countries with national health systems spend less and get better results. If we want a freer, healthier, more productive America, it starts with decoupling healthcare from employment and dismantling the insurance industry’s grip on our system. And if I have to hear another word about spending a Trillion dollars on defense, let’s be clear, National Health Care is National Security: more American’s die or go broke before the Ruskies, Chinese or some terrorists do a damn thing.
• End Rigged Rewards—Rebalance the Economy: America’s economy is no longer built around work. It’s built around wealth extraction. When corporations pay poverty wages, taxpayers foot the bill. When stock prices rise, it’s not because companies are investing in their workers or communities—it’s because they’re buying back their own shares. And when billionaires multiply, it’s not because they’re building new value. It’s because they’ve bought the rules. We’ve gone from 200 US Billionaires in 2000 to over 800 by 2020.

End corporate welfare for poverty wages. Track public assistance use by employer and charge it back. If your workers need food stamps or Medicaid, your business model is broken—and the public shouldn’t pay for it.

Cap executive compensation at 20:1 for public companies, compared to the median worker. Tie bonuses to long-term performance and shared prosperity—not quarterly optics. Ban stock buybacks unless profit sharing or employee ownership is in place.

Take the casino out of Wall Street. Programmed high-frequency trading isn’t investment—it’s digital looting. Any asset held for less than a year should be taxed like gambling. Volatility destroys stability, and it’s time markets worked for people again—not algorithms.

Founders who invent, build, and risk everything deserve to profit. But the hired class of corporate caretakers—who inherit empires and outsource jobs while collecting hundreds of millions, do not. Restore dignity to work, fairness to the market, and trust to capitalism. I have no problems with Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak getting rich, but caretakers like John Scully, Gil Amelio, Tim Cook?

Simplify the tax code so that ordinary citizens don’t need lawyers or accountants to comply. Tax filing should be automatic and free. Let accountants measure profitability, not plot tax avoidance. End loopholes for the wealthy. Tax passive income and corporate profits fairly. Make shell companies and offshoring harder, not easier.

Reform property taxes to stop punishing those who invest in their communities. Your home’s taxable value should be what you paid for it, not what your neighbor paid for theirs. Improvements shouldn’t trigger reassessment. Equity earned through labor and restoration belongs to the homeowner, not the tax collector.

Because if working full-time doesn’t pay enough to live, and investing in your neighborhood gets treated like a crime, then the economy isn’t broken. It’s rigged.

• Universal Child Care Is Economic Infrastructure: No economy works if parents can’t. We need low-cost, publicly subsidized, round-the-clock child care to support working families, reduce generational poverty, and allow full participation in the labor force. This isn’t just about fairness, it’s about GDP. Every dollar spent on early childhood care and development yields exponential returns in health, education, and productivity. It’s time we treat child care like roads, broadband, and electricity: essential infrastructure for a functioning society.
• A Learning System Built for the Future: Our school calendar still serves the harvest, not the student. We need a longer school year and day, not to cram more standardized testing, but to rekindle a love of learning. Longer hours support working families and rebuild the real-world social skills that “social media” has eroded. Education should follow a child’s interests, not just their test scores. If we want stronger communities and a future-ready workforce, it starts by treating education like the civic foundation it is.

• Ballot Access Reform: The current system protects the two-party monopoly by making it nearly impossible for outsiders to compete. In Ohio, Democrats and Republicans only need 50 signatures to run for Congress, while independents must collect over 4,500. To run for Dayton City Commission requires 500 valid signatures, and to run for school board, 300. These are high hurdles, especially for so-called “nonpartisan” offices. On top of that, Boards of Elections often disqualify signatures using questionable handwriting analysis techniques. If we want real democracy, we need equal access to the ballot and standardized, transparent signature verification.
• Replace Term Limits With Real Information: Term limits haven’t delivered new leadership, just musical chairs. Politicians recycle themselves from one office to another, with no fresh ideas or new blood. The real missing piece is not a countdown clock, it’s a real voter information system. Every candidate should be required to complete a publicly accessible, standardized questionnaire. These responses would be published in a searchable database, linked to campaign finance records, endorsements, and legislative history to see if they actually vote the way they talk.
• A Public Integrity Officer, elected per congressional district, 15 in total across Ohio, each with their own staff and budget. These officials would operate as regional ombudsmen for democracy, empowered to uphold transparency, enforce open records laws, investigate ethics complaints, and challenge corruption. They’d serve as independent watchdogs over prosecutors, boards, and public offices. Right now, if your county prosecutor shields wrongdoing, there’s no functional check on their power. State ethics boards and the attorney general often operate like paper tigers, underfunded, politicized, and unwilling to take on the powerful. A citizen who wants to challenge the people in power is currently facing filing fees, attorney fees, and risking retribution. This isn’t a winning formula, trust me, I’ve tried.
• A statewide digital backbone for payroll, HR, FOIA, procurement, meeting documentation, and case filings. One login. One standard.
• A publicly owned election platform with real-time campaign finance, candidate-matching tools, and automatic publication of candidate questionnaires. This platform must also serve as a centralized voter information hub, letting every citizen look up who represents them, when each office is up for election, how to run, what the role pays, and what powers it carries. Every official’s voting record should be easily searchable, alongside their stated positions. In a democracy, you shouldn’t need to be a political insider or FOIA warrior just to find the truth. Democracy requires transparency, and that begins with access to the truth, not digging through a bureaucratic smokescreen.
• Smarter Thresholds for Governance: Political subdivisions shouldn’t be defined by arbitrary headcounts alone. Instead, we propose a density-based standard that ensures governments can support infrastructure without subsidizing exclusionary enclaves. This reform would eliminate micro-municipalities that exist solely to dodge shared services and taxes, while preserving rural townships that truly need minimal governance. It’s also an anti-sprawl strategy: no more trading low-tax farmland for inefficient development.
• Regional Government: Metro areas that cross county lines need unified planning, taxation, and service delivery. Unigov has worked elsewhere, as has county wide government, but as I learned in the Army, the map is not the territory, boundaries need to be adjustable and show common sense.
• Mandatory Retirement & End Double-Dipping: All elected officials and judges should face mandatory retirement at age 70. Public service must evolve with the times, and fresh leadership ensures responsiveness. The retire/rehire loophole—where individuals collect both a pension and a paycheck, should be eliminated entirely. It’s a recipe for waste and hurting younger generations aspirations, not a recipe for wisdom.
• National Transportation Infrastructure Is Strategy: For too long, the U.S. has subsidized inefficiency, spending trillions on highways and airports while letting our urban and interurban rail systems collapse. The car and oil industries sold us a dream that made us dependent and divided. Today, we must reinvest in energy-efficient, high-capacity transit: high-speed rail, electric freight, streetcars, and regional light rail. Short-distance air travel should be the exception, not the default. The rise of remote work means we can design infrastructure that connects communities more efficiently, not just faster. A functional transportation system reduces emissions, supports equity, and saves money. A disconnected one keeps us stuck in traffic, debt, and decline.
• Reform Judicial Selection—Or Stop Pretending It’s Democratic: In Montgomery County, Ohio, the two political parties have a longstanding, unofficial agreement: don’t challenge sitting judges, prosecutors, or the sheriff. As a result, once someone takes the bench, they’re effectively in for life, not by law, but by political protection. Lawyers who consider running know the risks: challenge a judge and lose, and your legal career is likely over. Win, and you’ve just made enemies across the entire local bar.

This isn’t a democratic process. It’s a cartel.

End judicial elections entirely, or rewrite the rules. No judge should be allowed to run unopposed forever. If a race lacks a challenger, it must be re-held the next year until one appears, and then the winner gets a full term. Power should never be shielded by silence or intimidation.

We cannot fix our justice system if its foundation is built on fear, favoritism, and forced compliance.

• Justice Should Be Just—Not a Business: America locks up more people than any other developed nation. That’s not a sign of safety—it’s a sign of failure. We’ve criminalized poverty, illness, and addiction, while allowing wealth and power to walk free. Incarceration costs between $30,000 and $60,000 per person, per year, often more than treatment, housing, or education.

Prison must be a last resort for violent criminals, not a dumping ground for the poor, the addicted, or the mentally ill. Mental illness and addiction are health crises, not moral failings, and must be treated as such. Fund real solutions up front, not later in cages and courtrooms.

End the privatization of prisons. Eliminate profit from punishment. Invest in rehabilitation, education, and reentry—not recidivism. Require that every high school civics student observe a real trial, not the dramatized courtroom fiction on television, but the messy, imperfect reality of how justice is served. Track sentencing data. Expose its disparities. And hold the system to the same standards we claim to value.

A humane, effective justice system doesn’t measure safety by how many people it locks up. It measures it by how many people never needed to be.

• End Unaccountable Private Police Forces: Hospitals, universities, metroparks, and private corporations have created their own police departments—outfitted with weapons, badges, and arrest powers, but with none of the public accountability that city, county, or state law enforcement must follow. These private forces operate with taxpayer-subsidized authority and often work to protect institutional image over public interest.

This is not public safety. It’s privatized mercenary militias.

Ban the formation of private police forces. If institutions want additional protection, they must contract with public law enforcement, city or county officers, at a transparent annual rate. Those officers must remain under the control of publicly accountable agencies, not university presidents or hospital CEOs.

Policing must be a public function, subject to oversight, transparency laws, and democratic control. No more private armies for the tax-exempt elite.

• Reclaiming Public Equity: When taxpayers fund stadiums, they should hold a stake in the team. Cities have been extorted by billionaire-owned franchises demanding public money for private profit. If the public builds it, they should share in the ownership, just like the Green Bay Packers ^[16]. The same principle applies to government-funded research. From vaccines to computing breakthroughs, too many innovations born in public labs are privatized with no return to the people who paid for them. Public investment should mean public benefit, not corporate windfalls. Policies like the NIH Public Access Policy ^[17] ensure that research funded by taxpayers is accessible to the public . However, the commercialization of such research often doesn’t return profits to the public for research we funded. Hello Moderna, Pfizer?
• End Digital Sharecropping: Social media platforms and search engines have built empires by harvesting and selling our data. We propose a verified user system where people control the ads they see and receive a share of the revenue for their attention. Every user is a stakeholder. It’s time to dismantle the surveillance economy and treat data rights like civil rights.
• Citizenship Must Mean Something Again: Being born in America is chance. Becoming an American should be a choice. We’ve stopped teaching the duties of citizenship, and it’s showing, in our politics, in our polarization, and in our collective amnesia about what this country is supposed to stand for. Instead, every American should earn their full rights of citizenship, not through privilege or birthright alone, but through service and civic education. That means real civics starting in elementary school, including how government works, how to engage it, and what rights and responsibilities come with being part of a democracy. Every American student should witness a naturalization ceremony, to understand the seriousness with which others have chosen this identity, passed the test, and sworn the oath. Citizenship must be appreciated, not assumed.

It’s time for a minimum of 18 months of national service; military, Peace Corps, a Civilian Conservation Corps, public health, elder care, early education, something that connects you to your country, your neighbors, and your role in making it better. In return, you’d get free public higher education or trade school, and the right to vote.

No service. No voice.

This isn’t punishment. It’s the foundation of community. It’s the idea that democracy is earned—not inherited. That being an American is not just about what you get, but what you give. That love of country means showing up for it. As David’s father asked in 1969 in his now free book: “Dear Son, Do you really want to be an American?” ^[18]

The answer must be more than yes. It must be: I’ve earned it.

The Fourth Estate Can’t Keep Up

The “Fourth Estate” refers to the press and news media, historically seen as an essential pillar of democracy, alongside the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Its role is to inform the public, expose wrongdoing, and hold power to account. But today, the Fourth Estate is collapsing under the weight of shrinking newsrooms, fragmented audiences, and the rise of unregulated quasi-governmental agencies.

This new shadow government of public-private entities ^[19], public health boards, economic development authorities ^[20], conservancy districts, preschool initiatives ^[21], Educational Service Centers ^[22] has no direct electoral accountability and almost no consistent media coverage. These organizations hold public meetings, spend taxpayer dollars, and make impactful decisions. Yet they operate mostly outside the public eye because there simply aren’t enough journalists to keep watch. Need a few examples?

• When the wrong answer and no response spells corruption and coverup ^[23]
• Montgomery County Educational Service Center sued: Kettering Schools have some ‘splainin to do ^[24]
• ADAMHS needs to be put on the hotseat over the former Huber Heights YWCA site ^[25]

And these aren’t even close to all the ones I’ve uncovered; unpaid and disrespected.

Local news has been gutted. Sunshine laws are routinely ignored. ^[26] Meetings are scheduled during working hours and recorded inconsistently, if at all. Reporters are outnumbered by public relations officers. The watchdogs are underfed, and the public doesn’t know where to look.

When journalism fades, so does transparency. And without the Fourth Estate, democracy becomes an insiders’ club.

We must fund journalism like democracy depends on it—because it does. It’s time to create a publicly financed, independently governed journalism trust fund to support local investigative reporting, nonpartisan fact-checking, and media literacy education. Grants would be awarded competitively, with strict firewalls against editorial interference. We should also tax ad revenue and data mining profits from Big Tech to help fund this essential democratic infrastructure. Platforms that profit from public discourse must pay back into the trust that makes democracy possible.

In parallel, we must enact national fact-checking and political ad transparency laws, ensuring that what reaches the public meets basic standards of truth. If we want to rebuild trust, we must first rebuild the infrastructure of truth.

This Isn’t Cynicism. It’s Blueprint.

We’re not doomed to inefficient, fragmented governance. But we do need leaders willing to break the rules that no longer serve us.

We don’t need 88 county clerks maintaining 88 websites. We don’t need 611 school districts reinventing the wheel. We don’t need every court system using a different CMS from a private company. We don’t need five systems to track whether you’re a registered voter.

We need one secure system. One accountable government. And one clear goal: service, not political survival.

This isn’t about left or right. It’s about forward.

And if we won’t fix it now—when we have the tools, talent, and public disgust to do it, then when?

If you agree, share this. If you’re in a position of power, take this seriously. If you’re running for office, stop talking about taxes and start talking about systems.

Because the system we have now? It’s broken by design.

But we are not.

We can, and we must, build something better. Something worthy of the name “democracy.” Something worthy of the people who still believe in showing up, serving, and shaping what comes next.

SONG: For Rent; The Government Song. By David Esrati