God I'm the worst.
Anyways, today's post is about why government is different from business.
Every election cycle you get a few businesspeople running for office. Invariably, their business expertise/experience as CEOs is held up as a qualification for a position in government. "They know how to make money!" is the argument, and even sometimes "They will run government like a business!" Deficits and taxes and debt are often mentioned in this context.
The trouble is, government is not a business. Government is, in fact, pretty close to the opposite of a business. Business experience is a negative, not a positive, and rationally it should make you LESS likely to vote for someone, not more. Here's why.
The job of a business is to make money. This isn't just greed; any publicly traded company is responsible to its shareholders. As long as doing so violates no legal or ethical codes, the pursuit of profit should be the highest motive. To do less is to deceive one's shareholders. Business(wo)men should make money; that's their job. When you get hired as a CEO, your job is to increase the profitability of your firm, just like how my job as a comedian is to make people laugh, or your job as a cesspool cleaner is to scoop human filth out of a shallow ditch. NO OFFENSE BRO.
A politician's job is totally different because GOVERNMENT IS NOT A BUSINESS. Let me say that again. GOVERNMENT IS NOT A BUSINESS. GOVERNMENTS SHOULD NOT TURN A PROFIT. This is not hard to understand.
A government's job is to serve its people by providing them those services that cannot be efficiently provided individually or by the market. For example, it makes no sense for the government to inform you when you should eat or go to the bathroom. Those are things you can efficiently do yourself. A national Pooping Clock would not be an efficient use of the government's time. To use a more concrete and less silly example, the government should not be selling you groceries. This is a service that can be provided efficiently by regular businesses, at a profit. This is not to say that the government shouldn't, say, have some program that distributes food to the needy-- but the profitable business of selling food to ordinary people is not the government's job.
The government's job is to do those things that cannot or will not be provided efficiently by the private sector. In a free market utopia, only the rich will afford insurance. We see that today. That is an efficient solution in terms of profit, but it is not socially efficient. It leaves people to die, which has no monetary downside but has a significant moral and social downside. The government, then, should step in and provide healthcare (via a strong public option) since otherwise this service will not be provided by the market. Ditto with the post office; FedEx and UPS will ship packages, but the USPS will mail a letter to anywhere in the country for the same price. Whether this is still necessary in the age of email is debatable, but that's not the point; the point is, the service of carrying letters is socially efficient and thus the USPS serves an important purpose even though it does not make a profit. The government is not about profit. In fact, in order to turn a profit, it would have to tax people more heavily and provide fewer and less robust services. It would have to take more than it gives, which is almost the definition of oppression.
The government is not a business. It should choose its spending and income decisions based on the good of society as a whole, not based on the desire to make a profit. Politicians should not run the government like a business. In fact, the government should be run like a bad business: an inefficient, debt-saddled one. That is because by definition the things that are good for government to do are not economically efficient. If they were, they would be done by the public sector. Health care, protecting the environment, police and fire protection: these are things that, if provided privately, would extend only to an inefficiently small fraction of the population. The government serves everyone, not just the very rich. This is an important fact to keep in sight as it seems that a vast swathe of the right wing in this country has forgotten it (and some of the left wing too).
