Why Running the Government Like a Business Would Be a Disaster

Running business like a business is already a disaster.

"It's just business" is the modern "I was just following orders."

Profits first and only, humanity not at all. A liability. The capitalists do not concern themselves with the plight of the cattle.

A business is here to make money

A government is here to provide services

The goal of a business is to make profits, the goal of government is to provide services regardless of direct financial profitability.
They're pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum...

Also, government is built for stability, not efficiency. Ever heard of a company Bus Number? It’s how many individual employees can get hit by a bus, and the company continues to operate without interruption. A higher bus number means less efficiency, but also more stability. And importantly, even the most efficient companies should never have a bus number of 0, because that’s just setting your company up for failure.

If you have one dude down in IT who has been silently plugging away for 20 years, does all of the weekly server maintenance tasks without making a huge fuss about it, has slowly absorbed other duties throughout the years, etc? Yeah, if he gets hit by a bus, your company is likely fucked. Maybe not right away, but soon enough, when all of those “extra” tasks suddenly aren’t getting done and begin to pile up. Even if the company immediately re-hires for the position, the new person won’t know everything that the old dude was doing. Since the old dude had just been quietly soldiering on, a lot of his job duties were tacit and implied, rather than being written in a job description anywhere. The bus number is 0 in a surprising amount of multimillion dollar companies, because efficiency means there’s just one or two people holding everything together.

Imagine if the DMV was forced to close for the week, just because Janet in accounting got the flu and she was the only one who knew how to do some mission-critical task. Or even worse, what if City Hall shut down after a tornado landed across town? Because one or two people across town happened to work at City Hall, and were affected. People would lose their goddamned minds, because crisis is when people need the government the most. People expect roads to be cleared of debris, power lines to be repaired, access restored to blocked neighborhoods, water service to be restored, etc… But if the government has a low bus number, there’s a good chance that the government will shut down when a few government employees are affected. The bloat is, in large part, a redundancy to ensure continued operation. The government never has just one person capable of doing a task.
I always use railways to illustrate this example. Every developed country in the world has them. They are indispensable, cities would grind to a halt without mass commuter transportation. Yet, they are also notoriously expensive. They just don't pay their way. People couldn't afford the ride. But because they are an essential service, governments swallow the costs.

That's the primary point of government. Not to wage war across the world, but to provide essential services to the people that private industry can't do at an affordable price.
- That’s why trains are bad! They are as expensive as planes only slower! That’s why we should build more freeways!/s
Many conservatives would disagree with you about the role of government.

At the end of the day, the role of government is to manage a group of people such that they’re profitable enough over time to support the government.
- Well yeah obviously it need to be profitable in a way, but not in the accounting sense.
  Making sure your population is happy, safe and healthy to be able to generate revenue by taxation is how you make a country "profitable". I guess you can call it socially profitable.
I’d argue/expand that the real end goal of a business is to take over the world in some form or fashion. It doesn’t stop at profit. It stops at total control.
the goal of government is to provide services regardless of direct financial profitability.

Sadly not even close to reality.

The thing that always baffles me is that they never look to increase government revenue. Every company I've worked for the question was always 1 how to increase money coming in then 2 how to reduce money going out. In that order.

Because the way to increase government revenue is to raise taxes, and businesses and the rich can afford to lobby against that for them, so it means raising taxes for the poorest.

Which doesn’t raise that much and is always unpopular.
- I wrote it below but that's not the only way.
  
  Other things like finding the IRS (8x the investment) and job placement programs return much much more than what is invested in them. It's like running a restaurant and pricing alcohol at cost while planning for apps to make us the difference, that's just not reality.
  
  Granted this is still unpopular with lobbiests and would cost rich people money so them money
Isn't that what tariffs will do for them? (ignoring the blowback)
- Not very effectively. Tariffs return less than the investment in them due to a slow down in the economy they cause. Other things like finding the IRS (8x the investment) and job placement programs return much much more than what is invested in them. It's like running a restaurant and pricing alcohol at cost while planning for apps to make us the difference, that's just not reality.

The government, at least the US government, absolutely already is run like a business.

We can simply look at private schools. They have ONE goal: maximize profits.

The good grades and reputation is only their marketing to get people to pay the price.

Now imagine if a neighborhood school would expel students because they didn’t have good grades and it hurts their standing. Problem children would be rejected from all schools who don’t want the trouble. That’s a private education system.

I am completely cool with trump emulating the CEO of United Healthcare to a tee.

There are many parts of the government that are not SUPPOSED to be "run like a business." How much money did the Navy make this year? How much money did Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security make this year?

Of course, the answer is that they're not supposed to make money. Those institutions exist to defend the nation and to make sure ordinary citizens have an alternative to dying in a ditch.

The military makes lots of only for oligarchs, so that one is a bad example.
If the government was ran like a business, the navy would make shit loads by invading everyone they can and the country would be better off! Change my mind.

If a government is profiting off it's people, it's doing it wrong.

Not from the perspective of the class that has effectively purchased their government.

And hoo boy is it paying dividends for them and nobody else.

We've let big corpo order government around like a headleech for half a century.

It was going to swallow it whole to sell off for a tidy profit eventually.

When you prioritize unsustainable infinite growth/metastasis/private profit over, healthcare, the commons, education, even the once common feasibility of a single income supporting a household with children, aka supporting a future for society, turns out everything falls apart. We needed our government services, instead everything was privatized for the market to take a an ever increasing cut. Privatization of the commons has been a god damned plague. This is what happens when a society is forced to perversely serve the desires of its economy, instead of the other way around as it needs to be.

I don't care about "winning" the global economy, yet they've suckered us into feeling like we have to keep up and beat other countries like a dick measuring contest to win the privilege of affording the most plastic crap. I just want a simple happy life, don't you? The nordic nations understand this.

The way businesses are run is: "Make a lot of money for the owner while crashing the business, hoping for a government bailout."

Who bailout's the government?

Running a gov as business is pretty much the core of fascism (see Mussolini who coined the term)

I hate articles like this. Acting like 1) we haven't seen the US run like a business before (where was the NYT in 2016?) and 2) compromising on the entire claim with a hedgy "well, parts of it are OK, but definitely let's not go too far."

There should be ways that managers across government bureaucracy can learn from others’ successes. There are surely some ideas that can be imported from business — ideas that NASA and the Postal Service can pick up from SpaceX and FedEx.

Yeah, we've also seen what running USPS as a business has done to it. Such a sloppy and weak argument. NYT has definitely fallen a long way.

Would be? Has been. For decades.

So now we’re cheering the assassination of a healthcare CEO. Not because of him, but because government didn’t fix things the people wanted fixed for a very very long time.

This was "Slovak Trump" Andrej Babiš's tagline. Yes, he was shit but bafflingly, he still has quite a chance of being PM again.

*will

Because it runs counter to basic democratic values. Here's what Schäfer & Raumann, two professional change managers, had to say in 2009 on the topic of business vs. politics:
"[A political system's] committees are characterized by a culture of discourse and decision-making processes in which proportional representation, the principle of fairness, the consideration of wings, majority and minority interests as well as idea of political consensus and the finding of compromise formulas are important."
That makes politics very different from both business and science. They also note that good managers make for bad politicians, and vice versa. Unfortunately, I cannot find the source online anymore.

Two major differences between the state and other capitalist entities is that the state controls the currency and the violence. Just imagine a business with endless money and endless violence... Viola the USA!

Why would I play a small stringed instrument for the USA?
Militech, Arasaka, Netwatch, Biotechnica. And Mr. Kim’s Greater Hong Kong.