Guest post: Business people usually don’t understand public goods
Originally a comment by ctygesen on Check your criteria.
Business people usually don’t understand public goods. Success in public administration can’t be accurately measured solely by cost reductions or (worse) some kind of profit/ROI. Most of them have no idea how interconnected a lot of public spending is, so that “efficiencies” realized in one area usually turn into costs in other.
They’re also usually completely rubbish at the kind of long-horizon thinking necessary for most social programs and infrastructural investment.
And then there’s the absolute worst kind who do understand, for example, that if we gut funding for public education and aggressively prosecute a war against some drugs then our prisons earn a tidy profit for us. These are the kind of people Trump has tapped to run his administration with him.
Another aspect of running the government like a business that has long been overlooked is the purpose of a business: make money for those who run the business. That isn’t supposed to be the purpose of a government, but I suppose when these folks heard about the social contract theory, they remember the contract and forget the social.