Business leaders for President? No thanks...
Michael Johnston
Independent scholar, lecturer, consultant; Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, Colgate University
The notion that government should be run as a business is one of the oldest and tiredest canards in political life. As organizations, democratic governments and businesses differ in many more ways than they resemble each other. The have differing mandates (governments' being far broader, and open to many more pressures and demands in terms of what they do and don't include), revenue sources, accountability structures (governments', again, being far broader and more diverse), budgetary resources and constraints, modes of selecting key personnel... and on and on. Businesses don't have to deal with a built-in opposition; if an earthquake levels Seattle, government must respond while a business might decide to contribute, or might not. Businesses don't go to war, don't possess armies (yet) or (thankfully) nuclear weapons, and while they do have to function in the international arena they can do so with a much more focused agenda, and with more options for pulling back when the going gets rough. And on, and on... In fact, about the only thing democratic governments and business have got in common is a bureaucratic mode of management and control (go back and read Max Weber to see why that's a good thing, on balance).
Business leaders may come off as more successful than politicians, but (apart from a half-century's national blatherfest denigrating government and celebrating any and everything having to do with business) they can address a much more selective range of challenges with many fewer internal constraints and aspire to a much narrow criterion of success -- the balance sheet -- than politicians have to shoot for. Some business figures might well be good presidents, governors, or mayors, but where that's the case it would have far more to do with the individual than with anything generalizable about business skills. My own view, shared by few, is that we ought to realize we need politicians and political leaders to run a political system -- take away the politics and where's the democracy? -- and that we ought to quit taking the stale old bait offered by various self-styled "outsiders" in both the business and the political arena.
Social Injustice & Democracy Researcher
6 年I agree, no doubt about it, that having business people (so-called outsiders) in political positions tends to go bad(!). But I wonder, do we want 'insiders'? Meaning politicians that have always been politicians?
Editor-in-Chief, StateScoop & EdScoop @ Scoop News Group
9 年First off, +1 just for the use of two great words: canard and blatherfest. Second off, you're right that the concept of "running government as a business" is one that has in recent years firmly established itself in the political zeitgeist. But when I hear it in my own reporting of state and local government news, I think people might just be speaking in the vernacular or being careless with their language. In the govtech field especially, I take the idea to mean that they are adopting new trends like "data-driven decision making" or performance-based management practices. Basically, comparing government to business is a way of people saying that they're not going to be wasteful. When used in political rhetoric, I suspect the idea is being used as a device to attract people who dislike waste and who might be easily convinced to believe that government ought to be run like a business. I agree that it's a hazardous idea on at least a couple levels. That people casually suggest and accept that a governing body might operate similarly to a business venture could, if nothing else, further erode the already pathetic state of civic engagement we have.