A business is here to make money
A government is here to provide services
Running business like a business is already a disaster.
“It’s just business” is the modern “I was just following orders.”
Profits first and only, humanity not at all. A liability. The capitalists do not concern themselves with the plight of the cattle.
The government, at least the US government, absolutely already is run like a business.
The goal of a business is to make profits, the goal of government is to provide services regardless of direct financial profitability.
They’re pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum…I always use railways to illustrate this example. Every developed country in the world has them. They are indispensable, cities would grind to a halt without mass commuter transportation. Yet, they are also notoriously expensive. They just don’t pay their way. People couldn’t afford the ride. But because they are an essential service, governments swallow the costs.
That’s the primary point of government. Not to wage war across the world, but to provide essential services to the people that private industry can’t do at an affordable price.
That’s why trains are bad! They are as expensive as planes only slower! That’s why we should build more freeways!/s
Many conservatives would disagree with you about the role of government.
At the end of the day, the role of government is to manage a group of people such that they’re profitable enough over time to support the government.
Well yeah obviously it need to be profitable in a way, but not in the accounting sense.
Making sure your population is happy, safe and healthy to be able to generate revenue by taxation is how you make a country “profitable”. I guess you can call it socially profitable.
I’d argue/expand that the real end goal of a business is to take over the world in some form or fashion. It doesn’t stop at profit. It stops at total control.
the goal of government is to provide services regardless of direct financial profitability.
Sadly not even close to reality.
We can simply look at private schools. They have ONE goal: maximize profits.
The good grades and reputation is only their marketing to get people to pay the price.
Now imagine if a neighborhood school would expel students because they didn’t have good grades and it hurts their standing. Problem children would be rejected from all schools who don’t want the trouble. That’s a private education system.
The thing that always baffles me is that they never look to increase government revenue. Every company I’ve worked for the question was always 1 how to increase money coming in then 2 how to reduce money going out. In that order.
Because the way to increase government revenue is to raise taxes, and businesses and the rich can afford to lobby against that for them, so it means raising taxes for the poorest.
Which doesn’t raise that much and is always unpopular.
I wrote it below but that’s not the only way.
Other things like finding the IRS (8x the investment) and job placement programs return much much more than what is invested in them. It’s like running a restaurant and pricing alcohol at cost while planning for apps to make us the difference, that’s just not reality.
Granted this is still unpopular with lobbiests and would cost rich people money so them money
Isn’t that what tariffs will do for them? (ignoring the blowback)
Not very effectively. Tariffs return less than the investment in them due to a slow down in the economy they cause. Other things like finding the IRS (8x the investment) and job placement programs return much much more than what is invested in them. It’s like running a restaurant and pricing alcohol at cost while planning for apps to make us the difference, that’s just not reality.
There are many parts of the government that are not SUPPOSED to be “run like a business.” How much money did the Navy make this year? How much money did Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security make this year?
Of course, the answer is that they’re not supposed to make money. Those institutions exist to defend the nation and to make sure ordinary citizens have an alternative to dying in a ditch.
The military makes lots of only for oligarchs, so that one is a bad example.
If the government was ran like a business, the navy would make shit loads by invading everyone they can and the country would be better off! Change my mind.
I am completely cool with trump emulating the CEO of United Healthcare to a tee.
If a government is profiting off it’s people, it’s doing it wrong.
Not from the perspective of the class that has effectively purchased their government.
And hoo boy is it paying dividends for them and nobody else.
We’ve let big corpo order government around like a headleech for half a century.
It was going to swallow it whole to sell off for a tidy profit eventually.
When you prioritize unsustainable infinite growth/metastasis/private profit over, healthcare, the commons, education, even the once common feasibility of a single income supporting a household with children, aka supporting a future for society, turns out everything falls apart. We needed our government services, instead everything was privatized for the market to take a an ever increasing cut. Privatization of the commons has been a god damned plague. This is what happens when a society is forced to perversely serve the desires of its economy, instead of the other way around as it needs to be.
I don’t care about “winning” the global economy, yet they’ve suckered us into feeling like we have to keep up and beat other countries like a dick measuring contest to win the privilege of affording the most plastic crap. I just want a simple happy life, don’t you? The nordic nations understand this.
The way businesses are run is: “Make a lot of money for the owner while crashing the business, hoping for a government bailout.”
Who bailout’s the government?
Running a gov as business is pretty much the core of fascism (see Mussolini who coined the term)
I hate articles like this. Acting like 1) we haven’t seen the US run like a business before (where was the NYT in 2016?) and 2) compromising on the entire claim with a hedgy “well, parts of it are OK, but definitely let’s not go too far.”
There should be ways that managers across government bureaucracy can learn from others’ successes. There are surely some ideas that can be imported from business — ideas that NASA and the Postal Service can pick up from SpaceX and FedEx.
Yeah, we’ve also seen what running USPS as a business has done to it. Such a sloppy and weak argument. NYT has definitely fallen a long way.
Would be? Has been. For decades.
So now we’re cheering the assassination of a healthcare CEO. Not because of him, but because government didn’t fix things the people wanted fixed for a very very long time.
This was “Slovak Trump” Andrej Babiš’s tagline. Yes, he was shit but bafflingly, he still has quite a chance of being PM again.
