When did government become a business? I keep hearing government called a business, and business terms like “efficiency” creeps into the lexicon here among progressive Washington folk. Sorry, government is not a business any more than the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, or a public high school. Yes, they have some things in common, but so what? Governments do not even meet the most basic definition of a business. From Wikipedia:
Besides the fact that governments generally don’t have customers and aren’t designed to compete within a market sector and usually don’t generate a profit, there’s a bigger problem with applying terms like “efficiency” to government. Governments are purposely designed to be inefficient! Do you really think that the whole checks-and-balances idea was done in the interest of efficiency? That the way the Senate operates is done in the interest of efficiency?
One of the smartest things I heard after I moved to Washington, DC was from a senior person at the Library of Congress. She asked the room, “How many of you think Congress is designed to pass laws?” Everybody raised their hand. She said, “Wrong. Congress is designed to not pass bad laws.”
Congress is inefficient for a reason, and to some degree all parts of government are. For all the complaining about gigantic, evil corporations not caring about their customers or the public at large, and in the middle of a recession in which greedy businesspeople nearly destroyed a global financial system, I can’t imagine why anyone would be eager to associate the word “business” with government. The government has enough issues, thanks.
