Like a (failing) business…

For decades, maybe for centuries, the American business elite has called for the American government to be run “like a business.” Well, by golly, in (powerless) President Trump and (all powerful) Prime Minister Musk, they’re finally getting their wish. They’ve got a Chief Executive who thinks like a CEO.

The kicker? A country isn’t a corporation. A corporation needs to think in quarters…three months is about as far out as it can see into the future. It needs to satisfy its stockholders and Wall Street, but not necessarily its “population,” i.e. employees. It doesn’t have citizens, each of whom have a vote and none of whose votes count more than others because they own more of the company. It can consider, if need be, going gracefully bankrupt. 

None of that is true for a country. 

There is thus a terrible possibility that running a country “like a business” is a disaster in the making and we will all suffer for it sometime soon.

If there is a straw to pluck at, maybe it is that after all is said, and we’re very lucky, the egotists of the corporate elite will be regarded with something less than adoration, and will never again be trusted to run the nation.

Death, Disease, and "Like a business"...

There is an excellent letter in the LA Times this week from John McGlynn, who identifies himself as a business professional in Southern California. Mr. McGlynn offers a very important observation, to wit, that government is not “like a business,” in spite of what all too many Libertarians and Deplorables would have us believe, and if you try to run a government along the lines of a corporation you’re asking for a disaster.

Which is, of course, exactly what we got when Trump et al utterly failed to respond to the Covid-19 crisis. But, then, how could Trump and the Trumpsters do otherwise? Their ideology is government-like-a-business par excellence. And a business does not concern itself with public health. If people die, well, so be it. It is not the job of a profit-making entity to worry about such things.

So, thank you very much, Mr. McGlynn, for wisely pointing out what Americans should have known all along, but which, somehow, they managed not to. And, if there is any (however thin) silver lining to this dreadful affair, it will be that people will start hearing you and others like you, and realize that “government like a business” is a direct route to mass death and endless horror.

Even if that apocalypse is profitable and improves shareholder value.

"Like A Business"

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p.s., We can’t survive four more years of this. For heaven’s sakes, vote in 2020, and vote blue!

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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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