Let’s put a core principle on the table: Business and Government are inherently countervailing forces, and should be. If business is the engine and drivetrain that powers a nation, government is the suspension and brakes that makes it operable and safe. All brakes, and it doesn’t run; all engine, and you put it into a tree in no time. The question of balance between functions has vexed every carmaker from Ferrari to Yugo, and it’s an important question. But just to decide that we don’t need half of the car? Dumb.
For a hundred years, Republicans have asked for the biggest engines they can get, even though they have no idea how to drive. And like young Vermonters in their vast diesel pickups, they make tons of noise and have a load of fun… until they put it into a tree.
Herbert Hoover: The Roaring 20s, followed by the nation’s worst depression.
Richard Nixon: American manufacturing converted into American retreat.
Ronald Reagan: eight years of dementia followed by the savings and loan collapse.
George W. Bush: took Clinton’s balanced budget, said TAX CUTS, DUDE!!!!, and drove us into debt again.
Trump the first time: the guy who said COVID would just disappear, like magic, costing a million American lives and hundreds of billions of American dollars.
Trump the second time: raw, unfettered oligarchy.
It was P.J. O’Rourke who said “Republicans campaign on the idea that government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” But it’s so much FUN to drive fast and stupid!
This time around, though, it’s more sinister. This new breed of Republicans want to purposefully make sure that government doesn’t work, that we’re dissatisfied with it, so that we quit having any expectations at all and are willing to privatize all of it. (Ever try to get customer service from Comcast? From Blue Cross? From American Airlines? Good luck with that.) When Obama was working toward the first iteration of the ACA, there was a lot of noise about “death panels,” government bureaucrats who would decide whether or not you were worth treating. Well, friends, we already had death panels and still do—they’re called insurance companies.
Government is not, and cannot be, and should not be “run like a business.”
First off, 80% of businesses go broke in their first five years, and tons of successful businesses go feet-up without much warning. We can’t take the chance on that kind of instability when we talk about our water quality or prisons or traffic lights. One of the crucial functions of “the deep state” is to provide expertise and stability that’s hard for any individual congress or president to screw up, unlike a Chrysler or Boeing or Kmart which can fail at any moment. (We may be testing the limits of how much malice can be absorbed before we break government systems forever.)
Second, are we really prepared to say that tens of millions of people should starve to death because they can’t hold jobs? For whatever reason? Every dollar we spend to house and feed and rehabilitate and support the poor would be withheld if they were seen merely as customers who couldn’t afford service. Every dollar we spend to reduce drug prices and to develop new ones keeps lifesaving treatments from being luxury goods.
Third, almost every business success is dependent on something that government did, and that ONLY government could provide at the necessary scale. Whether it’s streets and highways, or general-service police and fire instead of private armies, there are things that can only be done by pooling the money of a hundred million people. As someone once put it, I can’t buy a hundred dollars of clean air. But all of our hundreds put together can accomplish important pollution reductions.
(Not to mention—ski resorts operate on mountainsides largely groomed in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, your GPS works because of satellites and standards developed by the Department of Defense, and you’re reading this on a distributed network originally designed and maintained by ARPA and the NSF. Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk owe every single dollar they’ve ever made to government investment.)
The valorization of the American capital class is an important story, and it isn’t wrong. But it also isn’t complete. We celebrate the ones on top and never mention the thousands of entrepreneurs whose ideas came to entirely warranted deaths, nor do we talk about the millions of jobs that came and went without anything to do with the quality of the workers. And we neglect the fact that every business exists in a physical and social and policy ecosystem that existed before it came along. None of us are lone heroes; we stand on the unseen work of millions and millions of others, in an environment made safe and level and predictable… by government.
Herb Childress 