Running Government Like A Business Is A Republican Scam

 The following is just part of a post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:

 The ghost of Ronald Reagan is grinning.

Every time a Republican runs for office promising to “run government like a business” — Reagan‘s favorite meme — I tell my listeners exactly what’s coming next:

— Tax cuts for the morbidly rich, 
— Gutted regulations that had been designed to protect average people, 
— Privatized (profitized) public services that will make billions for corporations and eat our tax dollars, 
— incompetent management of government agencies and our economy,
— And, soon, a slow-motion disaster that the rest of us end up paying for.

 

We’re living through that disaster right now, and it’s accelerating. . . .

A business exists to maximize profit for its shareholders. A government exists to provide services, protect rights, and ensure, to quote the Constitution, the “general welfare” of its people. You can’t do both at the same time: they’re not even on the same spectrum. 

When you try to run a government the way, for example, Jack Welch ran GE, you don’t get “efficiency.” You get cruelty dressed up as cost-cutting programs for average people and massive subsides and tax breaks for giant corporations and their morbidly rich CEOs.

Reagan started this particular con back in 1981, arguing that government was “the problem” and that corporate-style management was the solution. What he was really up to was laying the ideological groundwork for two goals: stripping the government of its capacity to serve ordinary people, and handing that capacity over to private companies that would then charge all of us twice as much for half the service.

We see this most visibly in how we’re all ripped off by for-profit health insurance companies, while every other democracy on Earth has a national healthcare system that costs half of what ours does, but the examples are legion. 

As usual from Reagan, it was brilliant political marketing and terrible governance, and the Republican Party has been running that same scam ever since. . . .

Trump assembled the wealthiest cabinet in American history, with at least a dozen billionaires holding roles in his administration, collectively worth nearly $400 billion. These are people who, along with their spouses, poured tens of millions of dollars into his campaigns, then were rewarded with the keys to the agencies they’d spent years lobbying or suing.

 

Trump’s so corrupt he’s even managed to screw up Reagan’s old saw about “running government like a business.” Instead, his regime is now running our government for the benefit of the specific businesses owned by the people Trump’s put into place. . . .

The fundamental problem here isn’t that these billionaires and CEOs are personally greedy, vain, or incompetent, although many of them clearly are. The problem for our government suffering under this GOP delusion about “running government like a business” is structural. 

A CEO’s job is to maximize the revenue return for shareholders — profit — even if that means cutting corners, externalizing costs onto the public, or treating workers like crap. Those instincts are catastrophic when applied to a government whose “customers” are all 330 million of us and whose product is the common good.

You can’t fire your citizens when they’re not profitable. You can’t outsource national security to the lowest bidder. And you can’t treat a nation’s core and essential infrastructure like a line item to be slashed when quarterly earnings disappoint. Although Trump and his lickspittles are trying their hardest anyway. . . .

Democrats have long understood that public service is different from corporate management. The people who built Social Security, Medicare, the Clean Air Act, the minimum wage, public schools, and the interstate highway system weren’t trying to turn a profit: they were trying to build a country. That’s a completely different job, with completely different skills, and we should start saying so loudly and clearly.

The next time you hear a Republican at any level, from your local school board to the United States Senate, promise to “run government like a business,” understand what they’re really saying: they intend to serve the interests of whoever funds their campaign, strip your government of its ability to serve you, and call the resulting chaos “efficiency.”

It seems like every new generation gets its own version of the GOP’s favorite scam: it’s the same con Reagan ran in 1981, the same con Bush and Cheney ran in 2001, and now it’s the same con Trump and his billionaire cabinet are running today.

The proof is in the ruins of our country. In the transfer of over $50 trillion from working class people to the top 1% since Reagan started the scam. It’s visible in the middle class going from two-thirds of us in 1980 to around 43% of us today, and it taking 2 paychecks today to have the same lifestyle a single one could provide before Reagan took an axe to our government and the unions it protected.

Share this insight with your neighbors, family members, and your social media followers. Teach them the difference between a business and a government. Explain what public service actually means. 

And the next time a candidate shows up promising to bring their CEO experience to Washington, run in the other direction because disaster is inevitable.