Government is not a Business

Be wary of the statement “Government needs to be run like a business.” It should not. It's meant to sound unobjectionable, but is a radical shift away from anything familiar.

Centralized Control

The Constitution is designed around the notion of decentralizing control. It's inefficient, as people often notice, but that's by design. Inefficiency is protection from tyrants. It makes things happen slowly, allowing time for deliberation. Every time you make something efficient, you enable change to happen faster than government can respond, as is happening now with DOGE.

Tyrants want central control. Be wary of the statement “The President is the CEO of the US.” They want you to think a President is a King, a central voice to tell us everything. That neglects the checks & balances of three co-equal branches of government, intended to distribute control, to have the various branches fighting with one another, to make sure there's lots of consensus before anything happens.

Checks on Power

When a Congressperson salutes POTUS and says “yes, sir, you're in charge,” they breach their oath of office. The whole point of distributed power is distributed thought, which isn't happening.

It's pointless and dangerous, to have all the thought be centralized in one person and then to have everyone just say “yes” because then you just have a zillion photocopies of one person's thought. If that person is even thinking. Democracy at all levels intends many people thinking in different ways and making sure many paths of thought lead to convergent policy. That's how consensus is built.

In Service of All

But even beyond that, government differs from business in another very important way. Business is founded centrally on the notion of profit made by determining who not to serve. It's rarely profitable to serve everyone, so the assumption is that it's fine to leave some unserved. Maybe someone else will serve them. Maybe not.

Business figures out its profitable customer base and just focuses on them. That's not what democratic government promises. Democracy, even beyond all the voting stuff, is about believing each person matters just because they exist, that dignity arises not from wealth but from being alive, that we are all equals. Government must serve each of us in a way that does not prioritize rich over poor.

Oh, You Poor Unheard Rich People!

Money already speaks. It needs no representation in government. There are people, usually rich people, who sometimes say that Big Business needs special attention in government. It does not. Business is not going to be forgotten, no matter what government does, so stop feeling sorry for it. Big Business has the shameless means to be regularly petulant, but in spite of its many pity parties, it is not suffering.

Undo the Citizens United ruling. Corporations are not people. Profit-making entities don't need to be voting. Their stakeholders can already vote in public elections. Businesses need no additional, redundant, amplified freedom of speech, no megaphone.

Business isn't going to suddenly stop happening if we change laws in some way that is unfavorable to particular rich folk. If the people who are in business now don't like it, they can drop out. Others will happily take their place.

Fairly Represented

What needs representation in government are regular people. Government sets the rules that all businesses must follow.

Adam Smith, called the father of economics and/or capitalism, expressed concern about morality in business. He very clearly understood that the optimization engine that is the marketplace will not find morality on its own, that business will tend toward tyranny if not forced to do otherwise. He suggested that if you want morality in business, it must be encoded in law.

It's government's job to make good rules that hold tyranny at bay. Some people and businesses will tell you they'd profit better if there were no rules. In my view, where there are no rules, bullies rule. That's no world to be seeking.

What Privatization Dodges

Nor should government be privatized. An important thing that government offers is accountability and auditability by the public, and redress of injustice. Many pushes for privatization are attempts to get around such scrutiny and accountability.

Business is a dictatorship in structure, where the US government distributes control to avoid dictatorial control. We're lulled by business success to thinking such dictatorships nonthreatening, but you can go home from them at the end of the day, they cannot keep you from leaving, and they can't threaten your family or property, as government dictatorships might.

Employees have a duty to business leaders, who have a fiduciary duty to shareholders, whereas our elected representatives have a duty to the public, those who elected them. Elected leaders must be working for The People, not vice versa.

DOGE Debunked

Business profits by efficiency, where democracy finds strength in inefficiency because it distributes power. Too-concentrated power is historically understood to be a great danger. A DOGE-like effort to focus on efficiency might be defensible in some businesses, where efficiency is the central concern, In government, however, DOGE undermines both the safeguards underlying and the stated goals of the US government.

Government must not be run like a business. Elimination of inefficiency is not an automatic positive. Privatization loses control of and accountability for things that affect citizens' lives. Such suggestions are active dangers to democracy to be discussed with great wariness.

 

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Other Posts by Kent Pitman on related topics:

• Speed Kills
• Retirement Savings
• Political Terraforming
• Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post was cobbled together from other writings of mine, so if you feel like you've read some or all of this before, you're probably right. But I wanted to put it all in one place.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude-Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Political Terraforming

This observation by David Roberts helped me crystalize some thoughts. I wrote them originally as a reply thread, but have included a tidier and slightly expanded form below that for easier reference.
   —Kent Pitman

My reply to David:

Rachel Maddow, over the last few weeks, has run some great pieces. In one of them, I recall her quoting one of Vance's idols saying something about just needing to rip out government agencies and install a smart guy who innately knows what needs doing. Your remark on libertarians matches that.

What they propose is utterly self-serving, not defensibly fair. It's full of bias and subject to corruption and degradation. No notion of oversight, like the current Supreme Court overseeing itself. But they soothe themselves that bludgeoning democracy into collective unconsciousness is ‘minimal,’ indulge the claim it's therefore a principled action, and then—in the safety of their own minds—call it a win.

This is why they dislike diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). If everyone were just like them—not diverse, if they had no obligation to include anyone not like them, then equity and fairness would come for free and there would be no one to include.

A need to satisfy someone other than oneself creates a problem they can't solve. They've given it no thought. In that light, it's easy to see why narcissists find DEI troubling. To them it is just an irritating inefficiency to be forced into having a mechanism for dealing fairly with anyone other than themselves.

Attacks on DEI aren't random. Just as attacks on women are not. Nor racial attacks. Nor those related to sexual preference or gender identity. And so on. It isn't just that they disdain these groups, though they do. It's that they want no rights at all. Rights are potential barriers to them. And barriers to them are the only ones they want to remove.

They want no rules. That's the kind of ‘libertarianism.’ they seek. But as I've long said:

“Where there are no rules, bullies rule.”
—me

They, these bullies, are terraforming our world to be habitable to them—at the expense of our pre-existing forms of life, which had previously thrived but which they have no use for.

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

The graphic was produced at abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux.1. The prompt was “Draw a black and white sketch of a bulldozer mowing down the supreme court's building with a crane and a wrecking ball.”. Using Gimp, I made some adjustments to the image it generated, flipping which side of the “T” the ball was on, adding a public domain image of the scales portion, adjusting the rubble and taking a small bite out of the columns.

Process Due

Seth Abramson wrote in a tweet, “Our descendants won't distinguish between pro- and anti-Trump, they'll just say, ‘What were those idiots thinking?’ “

I feel embarrassed knowing how easily future historians will mark Trump as a criminal

He's making generations of Americans look like morons in the eyes of history

Our descendants won't distinguish between pro- and anti-Trump, they'll just say, "What were those idiots thinking?"

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) November 3, 2019

Folks outside the US no doubt ask it now.

It's a fair question, but maybe the wrong one.

Constitutional government needs clear process as safeguard against idiocy. We just can't rely on intelligence to be there, nor idiocy not to be, in every moment of every day. That's too much to ask.

I don't mean to let us off the hook. We must introspect on how we got here. To assure intelligence is reliably present and available, it must be encoded in our processes, not left as an exercise to the individuals trying to interpret those processes.

Size is Relative

Toward that end, we too seldom question the oft-repeated myth that “minimum government is best government,” fed us by those who want government kept malleable.

Too big government isn't good.
But too small isn't either.

I have lately tended toward the belief that government must grow in proportion to propensity for abuse, not even just in reaction to abuse, but even proactively, anticipating the likely and covering reasonably anticipated cases that follow from trends.

Libertarians grump whenever government grows, but public response needs to be “If you exploited the common good less, we wouldn't have to complicate this so.”

The asymmetry is that we're stuck in an arms race where conservatives want to escalate their hold over society, and they use Jedi mind tricks to make progressives feel bad about responding.

If they want government to stay small, they should “play nice.”

Our Constitution needs repair, more process & process detail, if we're not to leave procedural action to the chance of idiocy or partisanship.

We need such additional detail to assure a nervous public in times of stress that processes being applied were not developed in the moment to serve Machiavellian ends, but are our normal way of attending to all problems, no matter who creates them and no matter who administers them.

Who Could Have Known?

“What were we thinking?” you ask, you who look on from afar, from across the ocean or from the far future.

Well, “what are you thinking?” Your are us on other days. Don't assume your greater intelligence will carry the day. Ask instead, “does process protect me?” Because unless your answer is a very certain yes, you should be as panicked as we are now, and you should be readying for your time to face this same event.

We look back at you and feebly shrug, “Who could have known?” It's a lame excuse, but somewhat true. This problem is new to us. Some saw it in advance, but many didn't. And so, collectively, because we act as a collective entity, we did not see this. And now, mired in it, we lack clear and strong process to get us quickly or reliably out.

But for you looking on, you all see it. Do not make the error of thinking this a uniquely US problem, of thinking yourselves immune. Don't expect “Who could have known?” to defend your honor when your time comes. Act now to buttress your respective constitutions for what's surely to come for you as well.

Trump-wannabes the world over are taking notes.

The Death of Shame

What gives Trump his power isn't just utter GOP corruption and Dem lack of spine.

It's that there are "norms of behavior" we have asked but not required by codifying them in Constitution or law.

We must fix that. The Constitution needs to grow.

The question isn't whether additional rules are needed, only whether we'll have the spine to insist on such necessary change, lest we endure a recurrence for having failed to.

We've relied on social mechanisms like decorum and shame in lieu of rules. But Trump is shameless. His political power comes of seeing decorum isn't a compulsion for him to conform. He sees an ignorable nicety, and his goal is never to be nice. He sees nicety as weakness.

If we get out of this, still an open question, we must add more rules.

Conservatives will cry "bloat". But too bad. Blame yourselves, GOP. You've earned every bit of clarifying legal text that comes in response.

Some Examples

We need process that does not reduce us to arguing whether major felonies are reason for impeachment. We might not enumerate a full list of reasons to impeach, but we should enumerate some, just so we don't waste months debating at least those.

The Constitution intends discretion about allowing more than just felonies, but that discretion should extend in the other direction, allowing discretion about ignoring felonies. It should say flat out that if there are felonies afoot, or there is even just strong reason to suspect it, impeachment must begin. It should say that if impeachment succeeds in the House, the Senate must engage it in the Senate under rules that are fair to both parties to offer substantive discussion without it being procedurally buried.

Even the question of burden of proof needs to be better spelled out. If a President is seen to act in a way that is adverse to US interests, but we can't prove intent, that might be sufficient to avoid a criminal conviction, but do we want such a person in office? We have to either have the clear right to try a sitting President or an easy path to removing the President so they can stand trial. We should not be forced to endure a criminal President simply for lack of some technical detail. Presidency isn't a right, it is a privilege and a responsibility.

Benefit of any doubt in the reliability and good will of our President needs to be given to We The People, not a dubious President.

Going Forward

I speak as if we might get out of this. That's overly optimistic. We won't.

Maybe—hopefully—Trump will be impeached. But even so, he's shown where Democracy is weak, opening a Pandora's box unlikely to be closed.

Such attacks will recur, and not just in the US. We won't get out of that. We can only prepare. Please let's do that.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This article began as a tweet thread of my own in response to Abramson's tweet quoted above. I've done some editing, rearranging, and expanding here.