In Case You Missed It
When wildfires tore through Los Angeles County, families at their kitchen tables were watching a volunteer-run nonprofit app—not official channels—to determine whether they had hours, minutes, or seconds to leave.
That’s the opening of IHS President Emily Chamlee-Wright’s latest piece, “An Efficient Government Is a Limited Government,” now live at Persuasion as part of the ongoing American Purpose series on the administrative state.
The essay makes a timely case: rebuilding trust in liberal democracy isn’t just about making government more capable—it’s about being honest about what government should be doing in the first place.
Drawing on her research in post-disaster recovery and the public choice tradition, Chamlee-Wright introduces the EBSACC framework (Essential, Big, Simple, and Comparatively Capable) as a practical filter for sorting what belongs in the public sector from what markets and civil society handle better.
Chamlee-Wright says:
“If we want people to trust liberal democracy again, we must create the conditions by which our governing institutions make fewer promises and keep the promises that they do make.”
Read the full piece on Persuasion.
