The United States is not suffering from too much government so much as from too much business all over the government. This president came into office to challenge “the establishment,” only to ensconce the country’s powerful business establishment in his cabinet, at the expense of Washington’s weaker political establishment.
Consider this: Where Business has a convenient bottom line, called “profit,” which can readily be measured,What then determines national Solvency in Law and by Legal Definition determines it's bottom line? Running government like a business has been tried again and again, only to fail again and again. In the 1960's, Robert McNamara introduced the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System as a “one-best-way,” businesslike approach to government. The obsessive measuring led to the infamous body counts of the Vietnam War. Later came new public management, a 1980's euphemism for old corporate managing: Isolate activities, put a manager in charge of each one, and hold them responsible for the measurable results. That might work for the state lottery, but how about foreign relations or education, let alone, dare I say, health care? People in government tell me that new public management is still promoted, though now it might better be called “old public management.”
In the United States, this problem has been developing for a long time. The Republic was barely a qarter-century old when Thomas Jefferson expressed the hope that “we shall…crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength.” In the last century, trustbuster Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the “real and grave evils” of too-powerful corporations, arguing that “it should be as much the aim of those who seek for social betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.” A few decades later, Dwight Eisenhower warned that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The Supreme Court granted corporations the right to personhood in 1886, and more recently extended that right to the funding of political campaigns — arguably a tipping point in two centuries of shifting toward private sector power in American society. Look around at the scandal of income disparities, at climate change, exacerbated by excessive consumption, and at the unregulated forces of globalization that are undermining the national sovereignty, and thus the democratic institutions, of so many nations. No wonder voters around the world are demanding change, even if some of the consequences are ill-considered. The valid side of their concerns will have to be addressed.
A healthy society balances the power of respected governments in the public sector with both responsible businesses in the private sector and robust communities in what may be called the plural sector — the clubs, religions, community hospitals, foundations, NGOs, and cooperatives with which so many of us engage. The plural sector, although the least recognized of the three, is large and diverse.
Governments experience all kinds of pressures that cannot be imagined in many enterprises, especially the entrepreneurial kind run by Trump.
Consider this: Where Business has a convenient bottom line, called “profit,” which can readily be measured,What then determines national Solvency in Law and by Legal Definition determines it's bottom line? Running government like a business has been tried again and again, only to fail again and again. In the 1960's, Robert McNamara introduced the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System as a “one-best-way,” businesslike approach to government. The obsessive measuring led to the infamous body counts of the Vietnam War. Later came new public management, a 1980's euphemism for old corporate managing: Isolate activities, put a manager in charge of each one, and hold them responsible for the measurable results. That might work for the state lottery, but how about foreign relations or education, let alone, dare I say, health care? People in government tell me that new public management is still promoted, though now it might better be called “old public management.”
In the United States, this problem has been developing for a long time. The Republic was barely a qarter-century old when Thomas Jefferson expressed the hope that “we shall…crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength.” In the last century, trustbuster Theodore Roosevelt spoke of the “real and grave evils” of too-powerful corporations, arguing that “it should be as much the aim of those who seek for social betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.” A few decades later, Dwight Eisenhower warned that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The Supreme Court granted corporations the right to personhood in 1886, and more recently extended that right to the funding of political campaigns — arguably a tipping point in two centuries of shifting toward private sector power in American society. Look around at the scandal of income disparities, at climate change, exacerbated by excessive consumption, and at the unregulated forces of globalization that are undermining the national sovereignty, and thus the democratic institutions, of so many nations. No wonder voters around the world are demanding change, even if some of the consequences are ill-considered. The valid side of their concerns will have to be addressed.
The relationship between business and government, a separation of powers no less vital than that within government itself, has become so confounded that it threatens American democracy itself. When free enterprise in an economy becomes the freedom of enterprises-as-people in a society, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, government of the real people, by the real people, and for the real people shall perish from the Earth.
Many of us may work in businesses and most of us may vote for governments, but all of us live much of our lives in the community associations of the plural sector. (The United States has more cooperative memberships than people.) This is the sector that can offset the destructive effects of the pendulum politics that keep so many countries swinging back and forth between public government controls and private market forces. Especially today, we may well have to rely on this sector to restore the balance that has been lost in the polarized, outdated politics of left versus right,conservative versus liberal.
People of the lie don't need the Devil to recruit them to evil; they are quite capable of recruiting themselves.
Has trump proven self doer of God's Word or merely hearer who redundantly deludes self and others?
Expect to hear a lot more about what Watch or Fox sees will keep voters engaged and away from Americas truest threat, Trump and his cronies.
This is how wannabe authoritarians roll. And that goes double when they rule by minority will.
Vigilantly guard your souls - take warning and safeguard your soul.
People of the lie don't need the Devil to recruit them to evil; they are quite capable of recruiting themselves.
Has trump proven self doer of God's Word or merely hearer who redundantly deludes self and others?
This is how wannabe authoritarians roll. And that goes double when they rule by minority will.
Vigilantly guard your souls - take warning and safeguard your soul.
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