It's A Bad Idea, Really

One of the worst ideas ever to infect American politics is the idea that successful business people will make the best political leaders. The idea sounds attractive enough, at first glance. We're a capitalist society that prides itself on its entrepreneurial spirit; entrepreneurs and CEOs are natural leaders; success in business should translate into success in politics; etc., etc., etc. But when you look below the surface, you should begin to realize that business people will make some very lousy political leaders.

First - To what do business leaders owe their highest allegiance? An ideal? A sense of fairness? Equality? Justice? Democracy? Negative on all counts. The bottom line - profit. That's it. That one goal is the focus of the business person's existence. Employees are secondary to it, other community members are secondary to it. Hell, even stockholders, and to a certain extent customers, are secondary to it. A business leader owes his or her allegiance to profit first. Everything else is secondary. Including allegiance to this country.

You know this is true. How many communities, towns, cities have been totally fucked because various small-minded business leaders decided to move their business elsewhere - even out of the country? Ask Flint. or Detroit. Or Saginaw. Or Buffalo. or Pittsburgh. Or Cleveland. Business leaders have no sense of community; they have no sense of allegiance to the people surrounding their businesses, or to the people working for their businesses. Instead, they are rewarded for sacrificing others for the good of the bottom line.

Now imagine such a person as a lawmaker. He or she would naturally first have the interest of businesses in mind, not people. After all, that is the culture they came from. They would also tend to think of people, even the people the represent, as expendables, just like employees. A budget exists not to facilitate government provision of services, but to meet expenses, or even turn a profit. People are tools, a means to an end, and not the end in themselves.

And that is the greatest failing of business leaders who move to public service. They fail to see themselves as working for the people. Instead, they see the people they represent as expenses, a detriment to the bottom line. Small wonder they always think first of balancing budgets, cutting salaries, cutting workers, and cutting services, no matter the human cost. Moreover, they are trained to think of taxes as an onerous expense, to be religiously avoided. As a result, they never, never consider increasing revenues (taxes) to provide services for real people.

In short, the skill sets that make business leaders successful in business make them very poor political leaders, and very poor stewards of the people's government. It's time to give them the pink slip.