SOUTH CAROLINA is a beautiful, inviting land with friendly, welcoming people — a land of limitless potential. That is to say, it has a potential limited only by our willingness to seize it.

But for all its advantages, South Carolina faces profound challenges, challenges so pervasive that our unofficial motto seems to have become “Last where we want to be first, and first where we want to be last”:

• We rank 47th in the nation in terms of overall health — with the ninth-highest smoking rate and AIDS death rate, the seventh-highest obesity rate, the fifth-highest rate of diabetes, the fourth-highest infant mortality rate, the second-highest stroke death rate, and on and on.

• We have the highest violent crime rate in the nation.

• More of our women are killed by men than in any other state.

• We lock up more of our population than all but five other states.

• We have the third-highest alcohol death rate and the fifth-highest overall highway death rate in the nation.

• We’re 50th in the portion of our kids who graduate from high school.

• We make just 82 cents for every dollar other Americans make.

We’re making strides in many of these areas, from falling infant mortality rates to improving schools. But in most areas, the rest of the country is progressing as well, so we’re not catching up.

There is no single cause for our state’s many woes. But most are self-perpetuating and inter-related: Because we haven’t been able to pull ourselves out of the poverty into which we were plunged following the Civil War, we haven’t invested as much as we need to make sure all of our children are well educated. Because we still lag in educational attainment, we haven’t been able to improve our physical health, or attract good jobs, and on and on.

What connects all of our problems is our continued failure to overcome them.

Government is the mechanism through which people come together to address their common interests, solve their common problems and prevent new problems from arising. That’s the idea behind everything from police and fire departments to public schools and highways.

By this most fundamental measure, our government has failed to serve us as well as the governments of the rest of the states have served their citizens.

SMALL, ISOLATED IDEAS

Look no farther than the intersection of Gervais and Assembly, and you’ll find lawmakers and other citizens offering a host of ideas to solve this problem or that one. Lock up more people to make our communities safer. Cut taxes to bring in more businesses. Pass tougher seat belt laws and DUI laws to cut down on highway deaths. Provide more money for public schools. But not even Gov. Mark Sanford — the first since Gov. Carroll Campbell to grasp the importance of taking a systemic approach to our state’s problems — is pushing for a truly comprehensive solution.

Some of the fixes we’ve tried have helped with the discrete problem they were aimed at; others made the situation worse. But even when individual problems are addressed, the overall result falls short of what it should be. Our current approach obviously isn’t getting the job done.

South Carolina is a poor state. If we are to cease to be a poor state, we must use all of our limited resources in the smartest way possible to focus on our state’s most critical needs, and take full advantage of our opportunities.

We are not doing that, in large part because the government is not set up to help us do that.

ALL ARE POWERLESS

We first quoted a local government planner’s plaintive question — “Why are we at the bottom of every list we’d like to be at the top of, and at the top of every list that we’d like to be at the bottom of?” — nearly 14 years ago, in the opening installment of a yearlong examination by this newspaper of the practices, policies and structures that stood in the way of solving the problems.

That series was dubbed “Power Failure” because no one in South Carolina had the power to act effectively in the face of the rapid-fire disclosures of one systemic failure after another across the government. A tenth of the members of the General Assembly were charged with selling their votes. The president of the state’s flagship university was out of control. The head of the Highway Patrol was caught trying to pull strings to get a top FBI officer out of a DUI. Add in a major procurement scandal and stark failures by the state to keep children under its protection alive.

What Power Failure documented and demonstrated was that the reason no one could act in a time of crisis was the same as the reason our government could not handle the more routine task of moving South Carolina forward: The Legislature had so jealously guarded its own power that no one — not even the Legislature — had the power to act effectively.

ANSWERING TO NO ONE

The long view was, of course, supposed to be taken by the General Assembly, but legislative rules were designed to stop things from happening, rather than encourage solutions — to promote incrementalism, even when bold, decisive action was necessary.

The day-to-day functioning of government was dispersed among 145 agencies, nearly all of them controlled by boards whose members couldn’t be held accountable for their collective decisions.

The judiciary was solidly under the thumb of the Legislature, and populated primarily by former legislators, ensuring that legislative hegemony was preserved.

Even local governments — the crucibles for change and experimentation in most of the country — were so hamstrung by the Legislature that they could not effectively address local concerns.

And the public was virtually powerless to do anything about all this: Voters could kick out the governor, but to what avail? He had little power. Their only option was to replace legislators, a district-by-district process made all the more difficult by legislators’ ability to select their own constituencies by drawing the districts, and thus scaring off competitors.

The result of the continued operation of the Legislative State, even in an era that had left the Legislature incapable of running things, was what the newspaper called The Government That Answers To No One.

Power Failure concluded with a half-dozen proposals for turning things around, only a few of which were implemented, and then only partially. In the 13 years since these reforms were proposed, no one has come up with an alternative plan to address the big problem — the fact that our government is not set up to do effectively the things that only government can do to improve our state.

THE ONLY REAL ROADMAP

We’ve squandered enough time. With no other systemic proposals even being offered, with solutions nowhere in sight, it is time to return to these obvious, but ignored, proposals. Today, we begin a series of editorials and columns that over the next few weeks will retrace the only real roadmap anyone has offered for moving our state to the top of the good lists, and to the bottom of the bad ones — the proposals made at the conclusion of Power Failure in 1992:

n• Reduce and simplify. Drastically reduce fragmentation and duplication in government, from the state to the local level. (The 1993 restructuring act eliminated about 60 state agencies, but still left us with more than 80.)

n• Put someone in charge. End confusion over who is in charge of the executive functions of state government and eliminate fragmentation of control. The governor, as the state’s nominal chief executive, must be given the authority to set direction for and demand accountability from state agencies. (The 1993 law put the governor in charge of just a third of the executive branch.)

n• Prevent abuses. Strengthen and empower the legislative branch, making it an effective counterbalance to the stronger executive, and enabling it to check potential abuses.

n• Make judges independent. Make the judiciary independent of the legislative branch. Find a way of picking judges that depends more on merit and eliminates the advantage of legislators as candidates. (This is the one area in which we’ve clearly improved since 1992: A later scandal led the Legislature to prohibit lawmakers from seeking judgeships and set up a merit selection process — which now is under assault by those who want to dismantle it.)

n• Account for every dollar. Institute a budget process that examines every dollar in terms of what is meant to be achieved, and sees that governmentwide priorities are set to ensure the taxpayers’ money is put to best use.

n• Bring power home. Free and empower local governments, which are the entities closest to the people, and the access points where they have the most realistic chance of having an impact. Local government must be run by and for local people.

THE WORST OPTION: DO NOTHING

There’s no guarantee that we’ll be any better off if we fully implement every one of these reforms. They will simply make it more likely that we will be able to meet our challenges; it still will be up to our elected officials to make good decisions.

But when the current system so clearly is not getting the job done, why in the world wouldn’t we try these commonsense changes that hold such promise?

To hear critics back in the early 1990s, you would have expected that if any of the reforms were implemented, even partially, the earth would have opened up and swallowed South Carolina. Yet we took a few steps toward reform, and nothing awful happened. If we complete that task now, nothing awful will happen; things likely will begin to get better.

But if we keep on making incremental changes, addressing problems piecemeal, something worse than awful will happen: nothing.