It's easy to mock Donald Trump for the ego, the doofy hair, the bellicose bombast, and leave us not forget, the hair. But the Donald's run for office is based on an underlying assumption that is taken as an article of faith by the Republican Party and is a dangerous fallacy; it's the reason why Donald is taken seriously as a candidate and why someone like, say, Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, or Regis Philbin, (should any of them run for office) are not.
The assumption is that If You Can Run a Business, That Means You Know How to Run a Government.
(cont'd...)
I first noticed this assumption in church, believe it or not. In most churches I've ever been in, most of the day-to-day business of the congregation is run by the Board of Elders and/or the Voter's Meetings. The men on these boards and committees, (and admittedly, in most churches I've been in these have mostly been men), tend to be important people in the community; which usually means prominent businessmen. And being businessmen, they tend to look at running a congregation the same way they would running a business.
So we get churches with Mission Statements. Why does a church need a mission statement? Because back in the '90s it became trendy for companies to have mission statements, so the businessmen running the congregations decided they needed them too.
Which is fairly harmless, I suppose. More bothersome is that these businessmen tend to apply criteria from the business world to evaluate how well their church is doing, and how it should improve. They look at the butts in the pews (the customer base) and the nickels in the offering plates (the revenue) and try to come up with strategies to maximize both; neither of which is necessarily the best metric to measure how closely a church is meeting its... well I have to say it... it's Mission Statement.
We get similar thing happening when people experienced in business talk about Education Reform. They seem to regard a school as just another type of factory, churning out Educated Students rather than Widgets. The teachers are just semi-skilled labor hired to follow the ISO-9000 procedures and to stick the kid's head in a GO/NO-GO gauge at the end of the line to see if they graduate.
They also like to talk about Competition as the panacea that will make schools better. Yes, competition between businesses can be beneficial to the customers of those businesses; but actually being competitive costs money -- either to improve the "product", or to reduce the price charged to the "customers" -- and none of these guys are all that crazy about spending money to do this.
And then there's politics. Trump likes to tout himself as a master of "The Art of the Deal". Geo. W. Bush was called "Our MBA President". Wisconsin's own senator Ron "Plastic Man" Johnson ran for office as a self-made businessman who was going to show Washington how to be more efficient. Actually, Trump has repeatedly filed for bankruptcy, Bush had to be bailed out by his family, and Johnson got his start by marrying his boss's daughter. But that's besides the point. Their experience in the world of Business is supposed to give them managerial skills that all those "Inside-The-Beltway" Washington pols don't have.
To a certain extent this is true: anyone who is good at running a successful business will have skills which would be useful in administrating a church, a school, or even a government bureaucracy. But running a business also comes with assumptions that don't necessarily translate over to the public sector. (They don't even always translate over to other businesses; I remember chatting with an old-school comic book shop owner who complained that the new MBA types kept insisting that he reduce his inventory to match their idea of an efficient business, not understanding that a large percentage of his business came from collectors looking for back issues).
The biggest assumption is one that these political titans of industry don't like to talk about, although you'd think it was pretty obvious. Businesses are in business to make money. They provide goods and services in order to generate income. Nothing wrong with that; it's what businesses do. Governments aren't. They collect revenue in order to provide services. Approaching the latter with the mindset of the former is going to create all sorts of messed-up priorities.
Running a government as if it were a business might be beneficial if we citizens were treated as the shareholders, entitled to a good return on our money; less so if we are treated as the customers, who are to be kept happy and coming back so long as it doesn't cut into the profits. If we're just the employees, well, just expect a lot of talk about how "we're a family" but don't expect much of a bonus and don't even think about starting a union.
Even if Trump doesn't survive the Primary Season, the underlying philosophy that makes people take him seriously won't go away. We're going to see people going into politics with a spreadsheet as their resume, touting a quarterly earnings statement as their qualifications.
But it's not enough.