The goal of a business is to make profits, the goal of government is to provide services regardless of direct financial profitability.
They’re pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum…
I always use railways to illustrate this example. Every developed country in the world has them. They are indispensable, cities would grind to a halt without mass commuter transportation. Yet, they are also notoriously expensive. They just don’t pay their way. People couldn’t afford the ride. But because they are an essential service, governments swallow the costs.
That’s the primary point of government. Not to wage war across the world, but to provide essential services to the people that private industry can’t do at an affordable price.
Well yeah obviously it need to be profitable in a way, but not in the accounting sense.
Making sure your population is happy, safe and healthy to be able to generate revenue by taxation is how you make a country “profitable”. I guess you can call it socially profitable.
Also, government is built for stability, not efficiency. Ever heard of a company Bus Number? It’s how many individual employees can get hit by a bus, and the company continues to operate without interruption. A higher bus number means less efficiency, but also more stability. And importantly, even the most efficient companies should never have a bus number of 0, because that’s just setting your company up for failure.
If you have one dude down in IT who has been silently plugging away for 20 years, does all of the weekly server maintenance tasks without making a huge fuss about it, has slowly absorbed other duties throughout the years, etc? Yeah, if he gets hit by a bus, your company is likely fucked. Maybe not right away, but soon enough, when all of those “extra” tasks suddenly aren’t getting done and begin to pile up. Even if the company immediately re-hires for the position, the new person won’t know everything that the old dude was doing. Since the old dude had just been quietly soldiering on, a lot of his job duties were tacit and implied, rather than being written in a job description anywhere. The bus number is 0 in a surprising amount of multimillion dollar companies, because efficiency means there’s just one or two people holding everything together.
Imagine if the DMV was forced to close for the week, just because Janet in accounting got the flu and she was the only one who knew how to do some mission-critical task. Or even worse, what if City Hall shut down after a tornado landed across town? Because one or two people across town happened to work at City Hall, and were affected. People would lose their goddamned minds, because crisis is when people need the government the most. People expect roads to be cleared of debris, power lines to be repaired, access restored to blocked neighborhoods, water service to be restored, etc… But if the government has a low bus number, there’s a good chance that the government will shut down when a few government employees are affected. The bloat is, in large part, a redundancy to ensure continued operation. The government never has just one person capable of doing a task.
I’d argue/expand that the real end goal of a business is to take over the world in some form or fashion. It doesn’t stop at profit. It stops at total control.
The goal of a business is to make profits, the goal of government is to provide services regardless of direct financial profitability.
They’re pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum…
I always use railways to illustrate this example. Every developed country in the world has them. They are indispensable, cities would grind to a halt without mass commuter transportation. Yet, they are also notoriously expensive. They just don’t pay their way. People couldn’t afford the ride. But because they are an essential service, governments swallow the costs.
That’s the primary point of government. Not to wage war across the world, but to provide essential services to the people that private industry can’t do at an affordable price.
That’s why trains are bad! They are as expensive as planes only slower! That’s why we should build more freeways!/s
Many conservatives would disagree with you about the role of government.
At the end of the day, the role of government is to manage a group of people such that they’re profitable enough over time to support the government.
Well yeah obviously it need to be profitable in a way, but not in the accounting sense.
Making sure your population is happy, safe and healthy to be able to generate revenue by taxation is how you make a country “profitable”. I guess you can call it socially profitable.
Also, government is built for stability, not efficiency. Ever heard of a company Bus Number? It’s how many individual employees can get hit by a bus, and the company continues to operate without interruption. A higher bus number means less efficiency, but also more stability. And importantly, even the most efficient companies should never have a bus number of 0, because that’s just setting your company up for failure.
If you have one dude down in IT who has been silently plugging away for 20 years, does all of the weekly server maintenance tasks without making a huge fuss about it, has slowly absorbed other duties throughout the years, etc? Yeah, if he gets hit by a bus, your company is likely fucked. Maybe not right away, but soon enough, when all of those “extra” tasks suddenly aren’t getting done and begin to pile up. Even if the company immediately re-hires for the position, the new person won’t know everything that the old dude was doing. Since the old dude had just been quietly soldiering on, a lot of his job duties were tacit and implied, rather than being written in a job description anywhere. The bus number is 0 in a surprising amount of multimillion dollar companies, because efficiency means there’s just one or two people holding everything together.
Imagine if the DMV was forced to close for the week, just because Janet in accounting got the flu and she was the only one who knew how to do some mission-critical task. Or even worse, what if City Hall shut down after a tornado landed across town? Because one or two people across town happened to work at City Hall, and were affected. People would lose their goddamned minds, because crisis is when people need the government the most. People expect roads to be cleared of debris, power lines to be repaired, access restored to blocked neighborhoods, water service to be restored, etc… But if the government has a low bus number, there’s a good chance that the government will shut down when a few government employees are affected. The bloat is, in large part, a redundancy to ensure continued operation. The government never has just one person capable of doing a task.
I’d argue/expand that the real end goal of a business is to take over the world in some form or fashion. It doesn’t stop at profit. It stops at total control.
Sadly not even close to reality.