Jamelle Bouie pushes back on the “Government should be run like a business” meme — this time advanced by Sarah Lacy, a writer at TechCrunch. “Can America Function More Like a Fiscally Responsible Company? It’s up to Us, the Shareholders,” she declaims. Which, Bouie observes, “reminds us of why tech writers should stay away from politics.”
To be fair, Lacy isn’t just wrong on the facts. Like a lot of tech writers who decide to dip their toes into politics, Lacy brings a worldview that is subtly — but clearly — hostile to democratic processes. To wit: Her post is an analysis of a report from Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and she praises her with phrases like this (taken from the first blockquote):
Mary Meeker has taken all emotions, politics, spin and manipulation out of the issues, to present a steely-eyed view of just how hosed our financial situation is.
And this:
It convinced her to spend some time taking a deep look at America’s financials, and pull out all the politics and emotion to just look at the facts…
Yes, there are some nods to democratic choice at the end, but on the whole, I get the sense that Lacy is bothered by the presence of politics in, well, politics. Which is a shame. Ultimately, Americans aren’t shareholders in a company, they are citizens with values and commitments. And far from obscuring our view of the issues, politics is what we do to uncover them. It’s the means by which we identify problems and priorities, so that we can eventually fit a kind-of-right peg into a kind-of-right hole. Factual errors aside, Lacy’s real mistake is in treating political discourse as less than essential, when it’s anything but.
Matthew Yglesias says, If you want to understand why government is not a business and should not be run like one, look at the problem of old people (italics are Matthew’s; bold at the end is mine):
A state is fundamentally an ethical enterprise aimed at promoting human welfare. A business isn’t like that. If you’re trying to look at America from a balance-sheet perspective the problem is very clear. It’s not “entitlements” and it’s not “Social Security” and it’s not “Medicare” and it’s not “health care costs” it’s the existence of old people. Old people, generally speaking, don’t produce anything of economic value. They sit around, retired, consuming goods and services and produce nothing but the occasional turn at babysitting. The optimal economic growth policy isn’t to slash Social Security or Medicare benefits, it’s to euthanize 70 year-olds and harvest their organs for auction. With that in place, you could cut taxes and massively ramp-up investments in physical infrastructure, early childhood education, and be on easy street. The problem with this isn’t that it wouldn’t work, it’s that it would be wrong, morally speaking.
Now obviously an idea like raising the retirement age to 70 isn’t as wrong as mandatory euthanasia at the age of 70. But by the same token, it doesn’t “work” as well at boosting per capita GDP or cutting down on American red ink. And both ideas exist on a continuum of the same tradeoff—bolstering the living standards of old people is an economically inefficient undertaking that we sentimental human beings find ethically appealing. That’s not to say that the spot on the continuum occupied by current policy is the best possible way to make the tradeoff. But it’s simply to dramatize the nature of calculus we’re talking about. As a “business strategy” it’s ridiculous—on a par with preserving the natural beauty of the Grand Canyon or having the military pay health care costs of soldiers who are too injured to fight—but that’s because it’s not a business strategy.
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