Government Isn’t Like A Business (you idiot!)

Fascinating piece on the Brookings Institute site this week, “Trump’s failed presidency” by Elaine Kamarck. In it, the talented Dr. Kamarck looks at the Trump administration and asks why it is coming apart so spectacularly.

Her answer? Well, you know how high-powered business executives and corporate CEOs and Hedge Fund managers will so often say that government would work “if only you ran it like a business?” Trump and his enablers believe that dictum as an article of faith. They want a government that would be efficient, profitable, and most of all, small enough “to drown in a bathtub.”

The kicker? Government isn’t like a business.  In particular, says Kamarck, a government has to be ready to deal with the unexpected. A government, she says, “...is in the business of preparing for low-probability events.” Things, that is, like wars, natural disasters, and, now, pandemics.

And in preparing for those-low probability but high-risk events, the Trump Administration has, she notes, “been especially inept ... from the beginning.” As a result, we have a modern plague that could have been prevented, or at least mitigated, but which wasn’t, because Trump et al never suspected it would actually happen.

The long-term take-away, I think, from Dr. Kamarck’s article, and from the Trump Administration in general, is that the run-the-government-like-a-business crowd is dangerous...every bit as dangerous as coronavirus itself.

For those who believe in such maxims, and who would put them into practice, suffer from too deep a faith in their own omni-competence.

Or to put it another way...from hubris.

Which goes before a fall, and makes the tragedy all too Greek.

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About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

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