Skip to main content

Government run like a business?



There can be little doubting that people around the world are, in the main, more than disenchanted with their political leaders.    Perhaps a re-thinking of how governments "operate" is called for.      It's a topic The Atlantic takes up in this piece "Government Should Run Like a Business—but Not in the Way You Think."  The by-line says it all - "Regimes around the world are under pressure to deliver more and cost less. Here's a plan for how to actually make that work."

"Government" is, everywhere, an industry in serious trouble. Not only do its consumers constantly complain, but some also are finding alternatives. Its products are failing the tests of quality and innovation, and it costs more than users want to pay. If governments were private firms, they'd be facing the prospect of either a takeover to "rescue" them or death in the competitive marketplace as their customer base migrates to newer alternatives.

Don't buy the government-business comparison? In fact, governments today face precisely those challenges. Start with takeover threats. Many governments -- from a variety of municipalities in the United States (Governing maintains an online list and map citing at least 31) to several member countries of the European Union -- have been forced to accept one form or another of outside supervision of their fiscal affairs. The Tea Party openly offers the usual corporate raider's solution: dismemberment and liquidation of the hostile takeover target -- in this case, "government" generally.

Look at competitive challenges to governments today: not just a range of alternative public-sector models, from the autocratic to state failure, but also a growing host of private-sector challengers in the provision of every sort of "governmental" service, from the state's traditional province of use of force to such newer areas as social welfare (as we'll discuss in future posts, non-state actors ranging from major defense contractors, responding to former Secretary of State Hillary's Clinton "soft power" initiatives, to terrorist group Hamas have gotten into the social services field). Many businesses have qualities of de facto government (top-down decisions, no consumer voice, little transparency, trampling of individual rights like privacy, and no viable means of escape; as I've written elsewhere, Facebook comes to mind). So it's not too big a stretch to say that governments face pretty much the same challenges as any other business.

At some point, all entities need a demand for their services, to deliver those services at a level of quality that maintains that demand, to respond to innovation and competition by improving them for the times, and to do it with the resources they can command by performing those functions. Any entity that ignores these realities will eventually "go out of business" -- whether or not it's a business."

To make government work in the 21st century requires the same basic "business plan" as in any other failing, but potentially still viable, enterprise"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more