Competence Is Not Elitism

The people who least need government let it slide on performance, impacting those who need it most.

Empty public intake desk with a half-finished intake form, posted hours sign, and an empty chair across the counter.

The opposite of elitism is not mediocrity. It is making excuses.

There is a particular kind of argument that plays out every time someone in Philadelphia suggests that city government should do what it already charges taxpayers to do, and do it well. The response follows a predictable pattern: first, dismiss the concern as aesthetic nitpicking; second, question the motives of the person raising it; third, recast the desire for competence as a kind of violence against the disadvantaged. America has gotten very good at this. It has confused the refusal to accept less with the crime of expecting more.

The word "elite" has come to mean two things that are mutually exclusive, and this confusion has been permitted to metastasize. In one sense, "elite" means simply "excellent": the best chef, the top-performing surgeon, the quarterback who can read the defense. In another sense, "elite" means "out of touch": the coastal graduate who does not know the price of milk in a Philadelphia corner store, the policy architect who designs programs from a conference room that no one they affect will ever enter. These two definitions sit in the same word, and every time someone points out that the trains should run on time, someone else gets to choose which definition to reach for.

The people who most need government to work are the ones least equipped to demand it work. Let me tell you about a guy I know from my late poker nights. He runs a coin laundromat in North Philly. He wanted to add a second location after saving up for years. He applied for the permit and took him eight months. Meanwhile he's paying for the lease on a location he can't operate. Him demanding that the government move fast would be perceived as government bashing. The government employees would truthfully tell you they are understaffed and that they genuinely want to help him, but they have to follow the rules. No one is at fault, but 'Carl' still got screwed because we tolerate this. Same thing happened to a pie bakery opening in Fairmount, took them from Feb. 2026 to Nov. 2026 to open their doors due to getting a million permits to do upgrades, etc.

Now watch what happens when you say this out loud

So you say it at a government town hall. You say the permits process is killing small business. Watch what comes back:

"No our priority should be affordable housing." That's a straw man - one can be in favor of BOTH fast business licensing and housing for everyone. In fact, not demanding both is accepting worse than mediocrity. We as citizens should demand both - a government that works for businesses, the poor, the rich, and everyone in between. Thinking that these are competing interests is a silly non sequitur.

When these discussions come up, the point of demanding competence usually gets dodged. No one in their right mind will actually say "Yeah, 8 months is an OK time to get the permits to open a pie shop." They'd be laughed out of the room. Instead, the person would attack you for not caring about issue X or Y, which is more important, or not accounting for the constraints government operates under.

We tolerate too much dilapitated housing in Philly...

Philadelphia has thousands and thousands of structures that have sat vacant for years, some for decades. Either broken down houses (I lived right next to one for years), or completely empty trash-filled lots. They drag down property values in their neighborhoods. They attract vagrancy. They enable blight. And the city doesn't do anything. Landlords aren't forced to do anything either. That is the normalization of failure... so we in Philadelphia have learned to not only tolerate but accept mediocrity in too many spheres of life - whether it be trash, whether it be government performance, or the cars speeding down the streets our kids play on.

And every time someone proposes the city actually enforce its own building codes (literally use the powers it already has, nothing new, nothing fancy, just do the job it is nominally supposed to do), the whining starts: "it's too hard", "you're not considering the nuances", "You're criminalizing poverty", and many others.

So we tell the poor family living next to a collapsing structure, well we can't enforce the code against your neighbor because he's poor and we'd be discriminating. Demanding competence and equal enforcement is often most beneficial to the weakest in our society.

On a more positive note, the day we stop accepting mediocrity and demand competence, something changes. Competance spreads. This is not magic. It is culture. And culture starts somewhere.

The inverse is also true. When we accept mediocrity in one sphere, we make it acceptable elsewhere and slowly all standards decay. The bar keeps dropping, and eventually, there is no bar.

The advocate insisting code enforcement is "criminalizing poverty" probably does not have a collapsed wall on her block. The non-profit executive explaining public littering is "an education issue" probably does not have McDonald's wrappers on his steps.

I think it was Galbraith, back in the 60s, who said something along the lines of that standards matter most for the poor and are enforced least by the rich. In Philadelphia, somehow we have come to accept that as our reality.