Certain people of limited outlook have long been able to score a debating point – at least with other people of limited understanding – by saying the government ought to be run like a business. It’s a valid point so long as it means only that expenditure of public money ought to be administered efficiently, and that vendors of goods and services to the government ought to be chosen through a competitive process, a real marketplace absent of corruption.
The further, really intended claim, that the people would get a better value if the service governments provide were provided instead by private, for-profit entities, goes too far. Along the way, it distorts or obliterates the notion of public purposes.
The reason government performs certain social functions is that the whole society has interests in the outcomes. Education and road-building are good examples.
Take roads. There was a day long ago when highways were like railroads still are today – privately owned and operated for profit – except they were made of wooden planks rather than iron rails. Is anybody saying we ought to go back to that situation? Maybe some people should if they want to be consistent.
Now streets and highways are one and all, of course, owned by the public. This is so obviously true it’s odd to think, why so? Well, every segment of the public and very nearly every public activity make use of them. Everybody has an interest in how they are built and maintained. Collectively these interests may be referred to as the public purpose of streets and highways.
Or again, they’re not just built so the big bourgeoisie can receive their components and distribute their products. They’re not just built so the proletarians can get to the places where they hand over their surplus labor. Nor so that petit bourgeois mom and dad can take the kids to, say, Wisconsin Dells.
All these interests have to be accommodated. The only way to do it is through a process accountable to be public, that is, a political process.
Of course, that’s not how you build highways. That function is bid out to an entity that is operated from the top down. There’s a difference.
Next take education. There’s a difference between training and education. The former develops skills required by and to be used for private purposes. The latter imparts the knowledge a child requires to function as a citizen: paying taxes, voting, understanding the laws and making a prudent decision about which ones to obey. As Vico observed about the Latin etymology of the word, education leads the citizen out from the child. That is, it serves public purposes.
The people generally are very sound on this. They understand that education creates potential and opens up opportunity. Only after they become adults and have a job do they submit to training. So nobody suggests that educational systems funded by public money ought to be training systems designed to serve private purposes – not even the big bourgeoisie.
But we do have privately owned and operated charter schools, funded at least in part by public money. And some of them meet the public purposes of education reasonably well.
Finally, those functions explicitly reserved to the branches of government by the Constitution and state constitutions, making laws, carrying out laws, and deciding cases at law, are one and all (at least in theory) performed exclusively for public purposes and in the interests of the people as a whole.
Now, if the notion of public purposes is well enough understood, the thoughtful reader will also admit that it nearly entirely – except in the senses already mentioned – negatives the notion that government should be run like a business, and the corollary that the people would be better off if businessmen ran the government.
The latter would of course be undemocratic. In business, the executive is informed and then decides, sets goals and policies, chooses subordinates and delegates at will, overhauls the whole organization or any part of it that is not meeting his objectives – in short, is in a position of command, responsible only to the shareholders, and that only in the limited and non-moral sense that they expect a return on their money.
Business has rather the structure of military authority than of public office. Only by obedience to order, without debate, can an army hope to move, fight, and gain its objectives. That is so, almost to the same extent, in business, though the urgency is not the life or death of the nation or its vital interests. It’s not so in politics, which must consult all public and private interests, with deliberate speed, before proceeding.
So it consequently is that businessmen have no special qualification to serve in public office, and on the contrary, that people with talent and experience serving - and negotiating, accommodating, compromising - conflicting public interests are in fact better qualified to so serve.
Unfortunately, my examples reveal a problem. It’s grounded in the ambiguity of the phrase “run [something] like a business.” Clearly decisions about public purposes aren’t business-like, and for the reasons given, ought not to be. But carrying out decisions, such as building a road, can be and sometimes should be run that way. Remember that, when we do this, we are giving public interests over to the private profit-taking interest. Prudence is required. This part of the problem may have to be solved on a case-by-case basis. It would probably be just as disastrous to turn over major projects of road-building (as opposed to minor repairs, which are done badly enough) to crews of public employees, as it would be to turn over foreign wars to armies of mercenaries.
A list follows of purposes and interests that might or might not be considered public. Inevitably this line of thought leads from purposes that the whole public shares, to purposes only some of us do, to purposes of which the connection to the public has become tenuous, to purposes you don’t want the government to be picking your pockets over. Along this path, the shared purposes of all gradually begin to look like the private purposes of some. You decide where to draw the line, and vote accordingly, keeping in mind you also have to consider what kind of entity ought to be doing any related work that comes up.
· The national defense, in some configuration. And the first line of defense is always foreign policy – cheap at twice the price.
· Health care, for certain protected classes. But which classes? The elderly, the disabled, to be sure. The poor? You can distribute that burden either through the public entitlement system at the expenses of the whole tax-paying population, or through the private insurance system, at the expense of people who are already insured. But then….
· Heath insurance. Who gets to be insured? And for what? There’s more to be said, naturally, about this.
· Financial security. Is one thing for workers, and another thing for the petit bourgeois. Even though Social Security is next to nothing by itself, at least the working poor are already accustomed to the level of finances – not to say security – it provides. On the other hand, it is possible to be financially secure without being among the Few. Maybe those people’s interests are served by voting Republican.
· The public debt. It’s also true that everyone has a measureable interest, greater or smaller, and whether they know it or not, in the full faith and credit of the United States. Even the bean counters at Standard & Poor’s. So we have to pay the interest on the debt.
The question of party, class, or private interest becomes more vexed at just this point
· Housing. Maybe you can’t afford it at all (working poor), or maybe you just can’t afford your mortgage anymore (petit bourgeois).
· Regulation in general. In particular:
o Of the greed of corporations
o Of the quality of the environment
o Of the quality of food and drugs
o Of the uses of land (mostly by state and local governments)
I guess you would like to pick and choose, depending on whether you are more likely to be harmed by the lack (consumers and workers) or existence (the Few and their wannabes) of regulation.
· Subsidies. For housing? Agriculture? Education, through grants and loans? It seems to depend on the interests – and influence – of the buyers and sellers.
· Basic research. They have a lot of fun with this, don’t they? Back to the days of Senator Bill Proxmire. But it’s not profitable for business to do it, and academe – well, that is their business.
· Quality of life. The arts? Public television? Some people think protecting the environment is a quality of life issue – the lives of the individuals of the endangered species.
· Transportation – other than roads. It’s probably in everybody’s interest to have alternatives to $5.00 a gallon gas. Waiting to provide them until everybody realizes they need them only hastens the day of need.
· Forests, Parks, Reservations. Public lands hold many kinds of valuable assets and tribal lands hold…casinos. All in all, this could be on the revenue side of the ledger, were there not so much potential for abuse.
It’s not impossible to find the public purposes in all these budget items. People whose private interests coincide to a degree ought to be willing to do their part to provide the revenue – at least to the same degree. You can’t begrudge money that creates public goods you yourself make use of. Certain deeply cynical people who already have more than they can even enjoy frequently prefer to spend some of the excess creating false resentments on this score. I guess it’s cheaper than paying their fair share of taxes.
Class Math will continue, visiting a few of these manipulations, and revisiting some of these budget items.
