After the terrible Challenger disaster someone asked an engineer during a Senate hearing "you mean an o-ring?". we need a Richard P Feynman great explainer for everything.
the argument has been made so many times that I cannot count them all. yet, is it a good one: can government be "run like a business"?
governments cannot simply be "run like a business" because businesses never have the full ability to do what governments can and must do. medium and long term strategic effective management of resources for everyone's benefit. think of the space program. dams and hydroelectric power plants. electrifying entire remote states. the railroad. the interstate system. clean air and clean water. maintaining the country's natural environment—trees make oxygen in this world, and we cannot live without it. first and foremost, flow of capital and sovereign debt in a nationally backed currency. backed with national reputation and power. including military and diplomatic plus of course economic benefits of interacting with us in mutually beneficial commerce. things the President's businesses have all benefitted for and yet rarely paid for in full. true of all businesses. including those by the President's special first buddy ❌🐦, or a lot of those others who helped elect the President.
businesses always rely on governments to externalize plenty of necessary resources to run the business that the business doesn't need to pay for and which do not need to be listed on balance sheets. businesses in the same field may seem to compete with others in the same field and yet they all cooperate more than meets the eye to hold consumers dependent on all those de facto "monopolies"—think of the "Rockefeller-Ford+ matrix"—our dependence on the automobile. similarly the "information disinformation ecosystem." what brand you're paying for is totally irrelevant as long as you're paying for the product that is you—you're attention to stay dependent and in the game. the game now is the North Klownistan Show. but that's not everything. and it's certainly not all that new either. after all the Romans came up with "bread and circus" and it's worked so well for them that even after the dismantling of their empire several other baby-empires, including this one, have been following suit.
in contrast we must expect our government to equalize the plainfield for _and by_ everyone. the government must deliver _to everyone_ fundamentally things guaranteed in the US Declaration of Independence. it cannot and it should not be allowed to say "yes, we do that but simply not for you!" whoever the you is. whatever the that is. as long as we recognize it—that—as a right and duty that the government is in charge with helping with. here rests the massive burden of selection. the Reagan government never intended to solve the homeless crisis—it may have in much part created, or at least helped create, or failed to avert—because philosophically it never agreed that it had anything to do with people's ability to find and pay for shelter. think about it. the FDR elections were won in part by saying that the Hoover administration created the Hoover-viles problem. which of course President Hoover did not create. businesses allowed to happen with the 1929 stock crash. one that President Hoover has tried his best to avert. yet to no avail. it didn't bother President FDR to place blame where it was not for political capital gain. then he, FDR, turned the country "saving capitalism from itself" by doing something no business alone no matter how large could have done. hiring the unemployed for national projects of significance to the entire country but for which nobody alone would have paid for individually. I take weekly hikes to this day on trails made by FDR's conservation corps.
he—FDR, like President Teddy Roosevelt before him—in a sense did run government like a _meta business_. meaning like a business of many supra-businesses, recognizing together that each person is a contributor in many ways to that meta business. without life and liberty there cannot be pursuit of happiness. without all three and more the meta business of our nation can but only die a slow but steady and certain death. to put it simply: computers and robots neither buy products and services nor pay taxes.
one lesson that for all his errors of judgement and positions, Henry Ford understood thoroughly: his workers had to also be able to afford to be his customers _and_ needed a place or more to go to with his vehicles and those places were national parks. where the railroads were also taking their customers, and where the same railroads were building cabins and internal roads and operations to make it appealing for folks to go. recall that in basic economics the human capital must _rest_ to replenish itself for tomorrow. all too often "run like a business" meant discarding the human capital at a slow but steady rate, or all too often instantaneously, called death, otherwise, and replacing it with new one, as opposed to minding the one in front of you. as terrible as it may sound it is real that the Gilded Age was built with dead people. if we don't spell it out we may just miss the essence. we don't want that kind of "run like a business"—coded in Lockner v New York (1905), and no longer good law—anymore.
recall that government is in part there to help protect all of the people from being overworked and underpaid to death. because some "business" simply can't see past their own massively consequential mistakes from ignorance.
Adrian kf0ohs S. Petrescu, Ph.D., J.D.
Chief Future Architect, InnovationTrek
We got here. What's next?
Accelerate Innovation.
In companies and self.
Grow flow. Naturally.
ASPetrescu@InnovationTrek.org
