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).
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Friday, December 2, 2011
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Ugh
Oh god I am really bad lately :(. When I started writing in this thing again I promised myself I'd be more regular. Today I want to talk about something that's not wargaming, though I know I should stick to what I'm good at. I promise I have another caster coming up-- actually, it's Commander Adept Nemo, unexpectedly enough.
Anyways, I'm really excited about Elizabeth Warren. I think one thing she does very well, and something that basically every Democratic politician should be taking lessons about, is articulate the ethos of the liberal position. Not the Democratic position, the liberal position. The media has done a good job in turning "liberal" into a dirty word in recent years, which is a bit of a shame. We shouldn't run away from our liberalism. We should embrace it. Saying "I'm a liberal" is saying "I believe in the mission of government." Liberalism is the belief in the social contract, and the idea that government's purpose is to improve the lives of its citizenry. People come together to form governments because they think they're stronger together than they are apart. Hell, that's on our money: E Pluribus Unum, Out of Many, One.
The market is all about efficiently allocating resources, but the government says that sometimes the market's idea of efficiency is wrong. Sometimes something is socially inefficient. Letting people's houses burn down if they can't afford to pay for fire protection is economically efficient, but socially inefficient. Liberals believe that sometimes we must accept a certain level of economic inefficiency to provide against things like poverty, starvation, illness, disasters (including fire) and etc.
I am a liberal, and proud of it. I believe that government can be a force for good. I believe that taxation is not slavery-- it is the price we pay for civilization, for roads and bridges and power and water and protection. If you are rich in America, you didn't get rich all on your own. You worked hard (maybe, inheritance is something else entirely) but you also ate food and drank water that was safe because the FDA made sure of it; you drove your car and shipped your products on roads that were built by the government; you communicated with your clients, family, friends, and coworkers through the government postal service or the government-developed and funded Internet. The government set up the environment in which you were able to make your money. The most brilliant investor in the world can't turn much profit if he has to hire mercenaries to protect his money, build and pave his own roads, grow his own food etc.-- and if he's relying on other people to do it for him, he has no reason to trust that they will do a good job unless he can oversee them or pay someone else to do so. And if he does that then we're starting to get government again! See how that works? The absence of government is an undesirable situation. Anyone who says otherwise has not really thought it through.
Conservatives forget this. They take government for granted. They assume that because things are ok now with the level of government we have, we can slash spending. In effect, they believe that the rich are rich in spite of the government, not because of it, and this is a dangerously stupid and myopic view. The conditions for wealth only exist in the presence of civilized society, and such a society requires a strong and well-funded central government.
There's a lot more I want to say on the morality of wealth distribution, but that can wait for another time. Basically, government is an invisible benefit to everyone, and in recent years some people have taken to denying the existence of that benefit because they've forgotten about it. They've grown accustomed to it. Elizabeth Warren articulates the liberal point of view-- that because government helped us get where we are, we have a responsibility to see that it carries on to help the next generation-- and I am glad of her for it.
Anyways, I'm really excited about Elizabeth Warren. I think one thing she does very well, and something that basically every Democratic politician should be taking lessons about, is articulate the ethos of the liberal position. Not the Democratic position, the liberal position. The media has done a good job in turning "liberal" into a dirty word in recent years, which is a bit of a shame. We shouldn't run away from our liberalism. We should embrace it. Saying "I'm a liberal" is saying "I believe in the mission of government." Liberalism is the belief in the social contract, and the idea that government's purpose is to improve the lives of its citizenry. People come together to form governments because they think they're stronger together than they are apart. Hell, that's on our money: E Pluribus Unum, Out of Many, One.
The market is all about efficiently allocating resources, but the government says that sometimes the market's idea of efficiency is wrong. Sometimes something is socially inefficient. Letting people's houses burn down if they can't afford to pay for fire protection is economically efficient, but socially inefficient. Liberals believe that sometimes we must accept a certain level of economic inefficiency to provide against things like poverty, starvation, illness, disasters (including fire) and etc.
I am a liberal, and proud of it. I believe that government can be a force for good. I believe that taxation is not slavery-- it is the price we pay for civilization, for roads and bridges and power and water and protection. If you are rich in America, you didn't get rich all on your own. You worked hard (maybe, inheritance is something else entirely) but you also ate food and drank water that was safe because the FDA made sure of it; you drove your car and shipped your products on roads that were built by the government; you communicated with your clients, family, friends, and coworkers through the government postal service or the government-developed and funded Internet. The government set up the environment in which you were able to make your money. The most brilliant investor in the world can't turn much profit if he has to hire mercenaries to protect his money, build and pave his own roads, grow his own food etc.-- and if he's relying on other people to do it for him, he has no reason to trust that they will do a good job unless he can oversee them or pay someone else to do so. And if he does that then we're starting to get government again! See how that works? The absence of government is an undesirable situation. Anyone who says otherwise has not really thought it through.
Conservatives forget this. They take government for granted. They assume that because things are ok now with the level of government we have, we can slash spending. In effect, they believe that the rich are rich in spite of the government, not because of it, and this is a dangerously stupid and myopic view. The conditions for wealth only exist in the presence of civilized society, and such a society requires a strong and well-funded central government.
There's a lot more I want to say on the morality of wealth distribution, but that can wait for another time. Basically, government is an invisible benefit to everyone, and in recent years some people have taken to denying the existence of that benefit because they've forgotten about it. They've grown accustomed to it. Elizabeth Warren articulates the liberal point of view-- that because government helped us get where we are, we have a responsibility to see that it carries on to help the next generation-- and I am glad of her for it.
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