Editor’s note: This-oped is by John Fairbanks, a Vermonter currently living and working in Washington, D.C.
Former Wall Streeter and now Bloomberg View columnist William Cohan has this commentary in the Washington Post on Jan. 15 about how Bain Capital operated under the leadership of Willard “Mitt” Romney. He concludes Romney is not to be trusted, that “his word was not his bond.”
Several commenters replied, in effect, “Oh, come on, he didn’t do anything illegal; he was just being a smart businessman.”
That may be, but that also raises a question in my mind that I’ve turned over for years: Why do we keep thinking businesspeople are somehow particularly equipped to run a government?
We have grown up in an age defined by the “Cult of the CEO,” in which they are largely viewed as being smarter, faster, harder-working, and better somehow than the rest of us. They are celebrated and rewarded, even when they fail (and there’s a whole separate post to be written on that). We constantly hear we’d all be better off if “government ran like a business.”
Count me as a skeptic on that one. Granted, my views are filtered through the lens of hard experience – I’ve twice been through lengthy periods of unemployment as a result of business decisions made far above my station, and millions of other Americans (heck, people all over the world) share that experience.
Government should be run efficiently, and often is, actually. That Center on Budget and Policy Priorities chart I posted on my blog on Jan. 14 – which was a response to a bit of erroneous rhetoric from Romney himself about how inefficient government is – reminds us of that fact. But government is intended to serve “We the People” in total, not just a few, or even just a majority, but “We” as in “all.” Given the enormous number and variety of the needs and interests of the “we,” and the fact they are often in competition or even conflict, government is bound to fall short of being fully satisfactory.
When anyone takes the oath of office as president, senator, or member of Congress (or a member of the military, for that matter), she/he pledges to “defend the Constitution.” When you accept elected office and take that oath, you are joining an institution chartered, as the preamble describes, “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Too many people take that oath with the intent of violating it, join government with the intent of undermining it.
A corporate CEO thinks in terms of, and directs her/his energy towards, profit. That’s not a sin, per se, but it’s abundantly clear, especially from the recent debacle in our financial industry, that nothing akin to “the general Welfare” or “domestic Tranquility,” or even “Justice” plays into that. In the name of efficiency or private profit, people can lose jobs and futures, healthy companies can be chopped up or simply dismantled. As long as the stock price is up there and the bottom line is fattened, nothing else matters. Until, of course, they screw up, then the great unwashed they just violated must come up with tax money to rescue them.
Some CEOs, Romney included, grew up in wealth a privilege, the “born-on-third-base-and-thought-he-hit-a-triple” syndrome. Like gifted athletes, they entered adulthood convinced of their own superiority, and likely with a sense of entitlement. The idea that a lot of other people, from the farmers who grew the food they ate to the workers who built the car they drive and the people who did their laundry and cleaning to their own employees, made their success possible tends to get lost. They do not have a “we’re all in this together” mindset. Hence the cry that you’re “punishing success” if you suggest the system requires rules. Hence the attitude that “it’s my money, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let the government take it and give it to some lazy welfare bum.”
On the other hand, the case can be made that more than a few CEOs and their companies benefited from public largesse, but that’s another story, as well.
Public service requires a different mindset, and, in government, a lot of other things matter. Protection of ordinary people from predation matters. Justice blind to wealth or privilege matters. Stewardship of public resources matters. At the core, the well-being of millions of people matters.
Brains, energy, hard work and vision are all laudable qualities, but absent compassion – the real kind, not the “compassionate conservative” lie – absent a sense of responsibility for those with lesser qualities who still need to survive in the world, they are not enough to merit entrusting a government to the hands of those who possess them. It is not anti-business to suggest that voters practice due diligence.
Some businesspeople have been able to demonstrate they deserve to be stewards of that public trust, but it doesn’t automatically follow that any successful businessman or woman should be assumed to be so deserving. As they say in business, caveat emptor.
