wkmac, thanks for turning me on to
takimag.com. I am always on the lookout for good paleo-conservative and/or libertarian sympathetic websites.
I loved reading "Government Should Be Run Like A Business". One always hears how goverment would be better if it were run like a business and it was a unique perspective to say the government is already being run that way. Hell, private businesses wish they had the captive consumers that our government has! Imagine the profits to be made with no competition and an unlimited ability to raise the price of your products/services!
I enjoy Taki's Magazine myself (originally known as Taki's Top Drawer) and Taki Theodoracopulos is one of the co-founders of the American Conservative magazine. I also enjoy the spirited debates that show up between anarchist type libertarians and paleo-conservatives from time to time over the role of gov't and just where the dividing line is or should be. Although my ideal is anarchy (
panarchy is actually better IMO) but I could live very nicely for a time in a paleo-con world of non-intervention, limited gov't and classical liberal economics, all advocated by many leading paleo-cons.
The idea of running gov't like a business on the surface seems to make perfect sense that you can't argue with. I mean the idea of business is to be successful at the lowest cost with a maximum on return and profit. But business also requires other things that applying to gov't may not be in our best interest.
Business wants to profit and as such it must do 2 things for longterm sustainibility. Expand it's market and reduce competition and competitive forces in the market place. A company in a free market does both by offering a superior product at a quality price and also being innovative to future demands and needs of the market as it relates to it's product. It can't force anyone to buy it's product or service, it has to earn that from a public free to make choices according to their own self interests.
Gov't has 2 powers that business in a free market does not. First is the means of force. I'm always amazed that as individuals we have no standing in any law, organic, natural, common, what have you to initiate force on anyone exept to repeal force being imposed on us by another individual. We call that self defense and that is an inalienable right coming not form man but from God and/or Nature's God. However, here we possess no idividual right to initiate force but when we gather as a group, we somehow magically achieve a right to now grant power to a central power to use force to do our will. We use collective means to force one another what by natural law we are prohibited from doing on our own. Using that reasoning, theft as long as in the name of the collective is legal. Murder, as long in the name of the collective is also legal and the list goes on and on.
Now we want to take that collective power and apply a type of free market mentality that 1) requires itself to grow ever and ever larger in order to drive ever and ever greater profits and 2) monopolize the market place to prevent competition from effecting it's profitibility and longterm sustainibility.
If a socialist gov't using socialism means it is out to control all aspects of life in a society via gov't control by gov't growth, then if one were to run gov't like a business, how would one avoid the socialist ideal not taking over when running gov't like a business when the idea of business is to corner the marketplace? As an employee of said gov't who has a nice job, a nice lifestyle and like any of us wants a secure future, is it in your vested interest to expand the roll of your job by finding new customers via the problem that mandates your existence or do you solve this societal ill and thus eliminate your own need? What woul you do if you wanted to advance? How do UPSers create more jobs at UPS? We get more packages in the systems. Gov't is no different except they enjoy a monopoly.
Have so-called conservatives been fed a line that results in the very opposite in many cases of what they thought they were getting? I wonder how many so-called liberals even get a pinch of "WHOA!" when they see some of the games being played by Washington. Running gov't like a business may seem good on the surface but if gov't is out to solve problems of society, doesn't solving the problem require gov't to in effect put itself out of business by eliminating the demand for the gov't service?
And you wonder why nothing in Washington ever gets solved!
I think I hear a few lightbulbs starting to go off signaling a Eureka moment.
