Why “Government Run Like a Business” is Hell

If you want government run like a business, what I hear is that you neither understand how government nor business actually works. And that government doesn’t seem to be working for you.

You’ve seen the interviews with voters saying things like, “I’m voting for candidate XYZ because he’s a businessman and wants to run government like a business.” Or maybe you are one of those voters.

If you are one of the people who say they want “government to run like a business,” my answer is, no you actually don’t. Imagine this:

You: Hello, 911, there’s a prowler in my yard…

911: Do you have an account with us?

You: Please come, I’m so scared…

911: Yes, ma’am. Your name and address…

You: (give name and address)

911: Does the prowler have a gun?

You: How the fuck do I know!!!!!

911: There’s no call for you to use such bad language, ma’am. I’m trying to help you. Your policy only covers unarmed intruders. If the intruder is armed there will be a $1000 co-pay….

You: But I don’t have $1000...

There’s your police, a government service, being run like a business instead of a service. But that’s a matter of life and death, you say...OK.

Ring. Ring. Hello, Acme Health insurance. How can I help you?

You: My doctor told me I need open heart surgery immediately. She said I need to fill out some forms…

Acme: What’s your policy number?

You (gives number)

Acme: Are you aware that we have a new policy regarding anesthesia? We only cover 2 hours of it during surgery. (I did NOT make this part up. This recently was announced by one of the insurers)

You: What? How long does open heart surgery take?

Acme: 3-6 hours depending on the patient’s condition….

You: How do I know how long my surgery will take?

Acme: Your surgical team will determine that during surgery...

Healthcare is a matter of life and death too. Every other modern nation acknowledges that, and deals with healthcare the same way as they deal with police services. Only in America is there such a thing as medical bankruptcy. There’s a reason why Canada doesn’t want to be the 51^st state, and Greenland wants to remain part of Denmark.

THE PROBLEM ISN’T THAT GOVERNMENT ISN’T BEING RUN LIKE A BUSINESS – THE PROBLEM IS THAT BIG BUSINESS INFLUENCE CONTROLS GOVERNMENT POLICY TO THE DETRIMENT OF THE MAJORITY OF US

Marjorie Taylor Greene, US Representative from Georgia, is an idiot. I am not using the word idiot as a random slur. I mean she seems literally unable to reason, to separate fact from fiction, and then to analyze the evidence to draw reasonable conclusions. This ability is literally what sets modern humans apart from other animals. It is this ability that we try to measure in intelligence testing. There is a widely circulated meme comparing her appearance to an artist’s reconstruction of what a Neanderthal may have looked like based on recent research. But the point isn’t what she looks like. It’s that she thinks like some throwback to a more primitive human ancestor, driven by emotion and instinct rather than by the ability to reason that sets our species apart.

As reported in a newspaper focused on reporting about Congress, The Hill

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5165176-marjorie-taylor-greene-criticized/

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said federal workers “don’t deserve” their paychecks during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Tuesday.

“Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue, by the way. They’re consuming taxpayer dollars. Those jobs are paid for by the American tax people, who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes and then pay these federal employees,” Greene said during the hearing.

“Federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks. And these are jobs that can be fired at will.”

Since you are not an idiot, no doubt the first thing that occurred to you is that her paycheck comes from taxpayer dollars, so is her job, for which she is paid more money than I ever made, not a real job? Does she even realize that she’s essentially saying this?

Next, federal employees pay income tax just like anyone else. Doesn’t she know that?

Federal employees are “consuming tax dollars.” OK, what are tax dollars for? They are for funding the necessary/desirable activities of government. One can debate whether activities are the right ones, or how much should be spent, but unless you believe the government should not exist, it involves people doing something. Does she suggest they should volunteer?

Somehow she seems to be saying that only people who work for private industry have real jobs. Is she even aware how many private sector businesses rely on taxpayer dollars? Doesn’t she know about government contractors? Does she think the government owns factories that produce uniforms, or weapons for the military, for example? Doesn’t she realize that private companies produce these things? So who is to watch over the tax dollars paid to these private companies to make sure there is no waste, fraud and abuse? Government workers do that. Who else could do that? Elon Musk, who is himself a major recipient of taxpayer dollars?

Anyone not an idiot immediately sees that is a bad idea, to put it mildly. Fox guarding the hen house….

Obviously, there are some problems in our democracy, and one of them is that voters would send idiots to represent them in Congress. Or crooks. Or liars. Or a president who is all of the above.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM

Pretty much everything that is a national problem --- from climate destruction to you having to work two jobs to barely pay the basic bills, this corrupt administration – all of it --- begins with the corporate sector’s longstanding efforts to buy politicians who’ll make laws that will help them make money, at our expense. That is literally why a corporation exists --- I mean legally. To make money. To “maximize shareholder value.”

The claim is they “create jobs.” Not exactly. The only reason you have a job is because they need your labor to make money. As soon as they can replace you with something cheaper, such as a robot or AI, they will. And the law allows them to do it. When they say they don’t owe you anything, that is legally true.

But don’t they produce all sort of things we need for our lives? Sure, and also things that are hurting us in various ways – but the point is that bettering our lives is not their goal. It’s making money. If they could sell you a frozen lasagna containing saw dust and rat shit, they would, and they used to until there were government regulations. Or how about a “cream cake” with no actual cream? They don’t list the ingredients to be helpful, they were made to do it by government regulations.

The regulations, or the way they are enforced certainly needs improvement – often because they don’t work well enough. But the point is the corporate sector doesn’t want any at all. They call that “freedom.” They call that “small government.” Maybe when you hear the word “small government” you think something different --- like the government isn’t going to tell you how to conduct your sex life? Nope. The GOP is all about that.

The problem isn’t “big government” – what does that even mean? The problem is big business controlling our government so that it fails to deliver in a way that will help the majority of us live happier lives.

People used to get maimed or killed regularly at work, and the response of industry was basically, “it sucks to be you,” until laws were passed to make them face some consequences. By the way, the time in America where no laws protecting workers or customers existed – such as in 1897 – is apparently what Trump actually meant by Make America Great AGAIN.

The reason regulations were created is because too many business could not be relied on to behave decently. Because their purpose was making money, and hurting and cheating people can be more profitable. It’s not that their goal is necessarily to hurt and cheat people. It’s that they don’t care if that happens if it makes them more money.

So why do Americans put up with such a horrible system? The only good thing one can say about the ACA is that it’s better than what there was before, which was fuck all. It is because the insurance industry is big business (the whole thing is part of what we refer to as “Wall St” for short.) And our politics is corrupted by wealthy interests, who have a variety of strategies, including a decades long brainwashing campaign so that all they have to say to anything that impacts their profits is, “socialism, communism, Marxism…” because people have been taught that there are two alternatives: what we have or the USSR. Good or bad.

That’s just not true. What I mean is, there are countries that actually exist – I mean right now, not in some fictional utopia—where people are just as free as we are, they have democratic elections and they used those elections to put people in office who passed laws to make their lives better --- including that they never have to worry about going bankrupt because of medical bills. But so many people in this country have literally no idea how well average working people live in other countries. Because we are constantly told how this is the greatest country, they just assume every other place must be worse. Most places in the world ARE worse but just being better than that isn’t good enough for the greatest country, IMO.

The truth is that this IS the greatest country to be rich in. You can do whatever you want, pretty much. And the richest still want more --- because they are literally sick with greed --- and they don’t care if the rest of us suffer in the process.

Our social safety net is meager, but even that pittance is too much. What? Retire at 65? Musk, and he’s not the only one, complains that people are living too long – poor people he means. So, Social Security should be eliminated or turned over to Wall St (that’s what they really want) because the deficit blah blah. No, actually all you need to do is raise the amount on which Social Security deductions are taken out. Any income over $168, 600 has no deductions for Social Security. So the low income people pay social security tax all year – the wealthier don’t.

This isn’t rocket science. What I mean is, this simple solution is also known to the people who have worked so diligently for decades to destroy the social safety net. They don’t care about budget deficits. They only claim to. They literally believe that because they are rich they are literally superior, more valuable as human beings. The bank balance is the measure of value and virtue. And this extends to everything. A tree has no value unless it is 1) turned into lumber of 2) increases the selling price of a piece of real estate or 3)bears fruit or nuts or sap that can be sold as an agricultural commodity.

Let’s zoom out and look at the big picture for a moment. Our whole society is based on a fiction that this whole world was created for humans by “God” – who is in charge —to be used by us in whatever way we desire, and that all of nature is some sort of a backdrop, like the scenery and props in a play for the actors to use.

This is not how things actually are. The lion is not “the King of Beasts.” The reality is it is an animal in an ecosystem and it could not stay alive without the microbes living in its gut. It eats a gazelle but the gazelle would not be alive to be its prey without the grass and the grass could not grow without the organisms in the soil and none of that could be there without the proper amount of precipitation…

The reality is that nothing is king of anything in nature, and our stupid ideas about kings, and lords and money—all of that --- is likely making us the first species to ever cause its own extinction, when there is no good reason for it to have to happen. Ideas are powerful. The idea that climate change is a hoax is literally killing us.

We exist in an economic system and we understand things about it through an information “ecosystem” or more to the point, a disinformation “ecosystem.”

Remember when, during covid, there were people designated as essential workers? They were so important to the economy and society that they HAD to go to work and literally increase their chances of getting a deadly disease. Doctors and nurses, of course ---right? But also the janitor in the hospital who is a low paid person. People working in a food processing plant – low paid and likely immigrants. Grocery store clerks – low paid. You get the picture – the people in the economic ecosystem who are analogous to the microbes in the lion’s gut without which the mighty lion will die.

To put it another way: all the hedge fund managers go on strike. Do you even notice? How about: all the garbage collectors go on strike…

The wealthy use their money to buy the political system. But they can’t exist without their prey – their customers. Their money comes from our pockets. Here’s what I really don’t understand. Everything in the “private sector” relies on selling something to someone: sometimes it’s an individual, sometimes another business and sometimes it’s to the government, because the government doesn’t, for example run factories that produce jet fighters for the military, private corporations do. Same with food sent overseas as foreign aid – that’s grown on farms that are part of the “private sector.”

It looks to me like there are a lot of people in this country who don’t understand this. Here’s the reality: without government spending, that is our collective financing of certain things in society because we the people are ultimately “the government” many of these so-called “self-made” heroes of the business world could never have made a dime.

Let’s talk about Jeff Bezos’ $200 billion dollar pile of wealth. In the “King of Beasts” version of the story, Bezos is the lion, so strong and superior – the self-made man, the heroic caption of industry with the great idea, Amazon.

Now let’s tell the real story, the ecosystem version. It starts back in the day with the signing of the Constitution that created the United States Postal Service, staffed by federal workers. The initial idea behind was a means to deliver newspaper and books so that the voters could be informed sufficiently to be able to make decisions at the ballot box, and to be able to communicate ideas through letters to those too far away to converse face to face.

But it was also essential for commerce. You have a dry goods store in your town that sells fabric for clothing. But you don’t have a factory that makes it. You need to order some from a city 70 miles away. So you send them a letter. The other choice would be getting on your horse, or paying someone else to get on their horse to take that order to them. But you can send a letter while you stay home to mind the store, because of those federal workers – the ones Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks don’t do “real jobs” because they are paid by the taxpayers.

Fast forward to someone having the idea of a department store – where you can go to one big store that has fabric, tools, dishes...you name it. These exist in cities. But then they realize they can print up a catalog and mail these to people in the small towns and rural areas, and they can order goods through the US Postal Service. Every place has a post office, because the post office is a government service. The government doesn’t say, “It’s not profitable to have a post office in a town that small.” Most famous of these catalogs was the Sears Roebuck catalog, and it was a lifeline for rural America because of the US Postal Service.

I live in a county with less than 20K people. We have 10 post offices. Do you know how many UPS and FEDEX offices we have? Zero. In recent years, a drug store has become a collection point for UPS shipments if you already have a pre-printed label. A computer repair store does the same for FEDEX. Otherwise, it’s a 20 mile drive to go to one of their offices. That’s because they are not a service – they are for profit businesses. And we’re not worth it, in terms of having a convenient office. Our convenience is not what they’re about. Our convenience is what our government service is about.

Fast forward to the 20^th century. The US government has used taxpayers funds to invent and set up the internet, originally for military communication. That spreads to academia. Then it becomes available to the public as the new “information super highway.” Businesses take advantage of that tax-payer funded creation to become ISPs. Meanwhile, at tax-payer expense, the US has built everything from interstate highways to the paved main street in a small town.

At some point, people realize that they can use the internet in commerce. The software and hardware are developed to be able to build web sites with pictures. First you can advertise your business, and ultimately do business via the web site.

Now here comes Jeff Bezos. He realizes that the internet is the answer to a book problem. Amazon started as an online book store.

Your local bookstore is great because you can actually go in and browse books. You can maybe go to a book signing there. Maybe they even have a cafe, which is really cool. Your local library is great because it is a government service and you can check out books for free. But both of those have a serious deficit – the limitations of a physical space. There are literally millions and millions of different books but your book store or library can only fit so many. So they have to choose. Maybe you can special order a book they don’t have, but maybe you don’t know it exists.

The internet solves the problem of physical space. You can list every book title in existence, as long as someone does the data entry and you have enough disk space. And customers can search for books by author, title, or topic.

Bezos and his wife started the business in their garage, but they could not have done it without all the infrastructure taxpayers had already paid for and were paying for, even taxpayers who never bought a thing from Amazon. Ultimately it expanded into a huge empire – the electronic version of the Sears Roebuck catalog where you could order anything. Better than any print catalog, because there is no limitation to the number of items you can list in an on-line catalog.

But to send out all those items you need people packing them up in boxes, getting them on the shelves in warehouses. Amazon would be nothing without the people doing that. He pays them poorly and works them to death, He could pay them better and hire more people so they weren’t so run off their feet they barely have time to pee, because they are timed and penalized if they’re too slow. But then that SOB might only have a $100 billion dollars. Boo-fucking-hoo, right?

Amazon becomes successful because it really helps people not to spend their days off going from one store to another, and for people who don’t have much choice in stores where they live. You can shop for whatever you need in the middle of the night, and spend your day off at the beach -- now you can even order from your phone while on the beach. People love this.

But we the people also built the things that made this all possible – in business terms, the taxpayers were the OG investors. But somehow Bezos takes all the profits. He owes us, and that’s called “paying taxes” but he doesn’t want to do that. None of them do. So he uses his money to influence politicians to give him, and all the rest like him tax cuts, again at our expense, because the money is intended to be taken from other government programs that out lives depend on: healthcare, the US Weather service, the US Postal Service, the Veterans Administration (you can risk your lives for us, but fuck you – that is really nasty.)

Bezos needs to be punished. And we can punish him because Amazon is no longer the only way to buy things on line. We can boycott.

As someone has rightly pointed out, a one day boycott doesn’t really do much if you just go and buy a bunch of things at that business the day after. It’s a protest, just like a standing somewhere with a sign. It sends a message. Ultimately, what is needed is something more – stop buying there altogether. And to announce that you have stopped buying there altogether – or until the objectionable behavior stops.

As people, we have practical issues. There are things we need. In some cases, we can simply stop using a business. It is perfectly possible to buy things online without going to Amazon, or to use some store other than Target. In some cases, though there’s a big problem. How can you boycott gas when: there is little to no mass transit where you are, and you can’t afford to buy an electric car? You can try to use less gas (good for the planet). Maybe you can carpool once in a while, or consolidate your errands to do them on your way home from work. Part of the problem is the way we tend to think – all or nothing. But if you carpool once a week, or use mass transit once a week, based on the five-day work week idea, you will reduce your gas usage by 20% - think about a corporation having a 20% drop in sales and that is a big deal, when tens of millions are doing it.

But the power of a boycott is not just in lower sales income. The real power is in the stock price. All the ultra-rich have to store their wealth somewhere – and that somewhere is the stock market. Yes, there are some middle class people that have 401Ks for retirement in the stock market but the majority of shareholders are insurance companies, billionaire CEOs and that ilk.

Even more important than the sales figures is the stock price. The stock market is full of people who only care about making money. They don’t buy a stock because they “believe” in the mission of the business. They just think it will make them money. So you punch them in the face big time, hit them where it hurts most by making their stock go down. And the rats fleeing the ship of a sinking stock price fast. Hate Elon Musk? That’s where he’s vulnerable and the Tesla boycott and protests are big time important. Good for you who are doing that. Big time praise!!!!

The reason why people like Musk and Bezos are so insanely rich is that there is literally something wrong with them mentally – they are not normal. They hoard money.

If somehow a billion dollars dropped into your lap right now, you wouldn’t know whether to shit or go blind. What would you do?

First, you’d quit your job because almost no one loves their job – by love I mean you’d do it as a volunteer because you believe in it so much. You might be one of the lucky ones who does, but even so, you might do it fewer hours per week or in a different way. If you love teaching, you might set up a free school, or you might join Doctors Without Borders, or go work for the ACLU instead of a corporate law firm. You might start an animal rescue instead of working at Pet Smart.

Then you’d buy your dream house, car, boat etc. Then you’d start paying off mortgages for family and friends, tuition, hospital bills for your sister, you get the idea. Then you’d start donating to charities to help people you didn’t even know.

I know you would because it is a fact that poor people devote a larger percent of their income to charity than rich people. That is because many of the rich literally have a mental problem – they hoard money, they love money not as a tool, but as a thing in itself. They apparently believe it makes them somehow a better person, fills some emptiness inside --- something like that. Something pathological. Because it makes others grovel to them – and that is sick shit to want others to grovel to you. So if you want to punish wealth hoarders --- attack their wealth.

They care about their wealth so much that they are literally ready to walk over dead bodies to keep it – our dead bodies, my friends. They’ve already walked over dead bodies to amass it, in many cases.

The people who haven’t also tend to be the people who give excess money away, people like Taylor Swift for example. She got rich by her creative talent that made so many people happy. She pays her staff, because a lot of staff are needed to put on a big musical event, very well. Every place she performs, she makes a big donation to the local food bank – and she doesn’t turn that into a photo op. This is the behavior of a normal person – a decent person — who gets rich. Not a sick money hoarder.

Their money is their power, but it is also their weakness. Remember that!