Government is not business

If you scour the pages of LinkedIn, it won’t take long before you begin running into folks from the corporate sector who are attempting to rationalize Elon Musk‘s current approach to organizational change within the US federal government. Many of them are drawing on their experiences, or their veneration of, startup culture, and I have seen posts lately, that I’m not going to bother to link to, which talk about the principle of “move fast and break things“ being worth a shot when it comes to government. Treat it like a startup. That way you get more innovation.

It shouldn’t even require a response. But here we are.

Governments are not businesses. They don’t resemble businesses in any way. From a business perspective, the job of government is to provide a stable social substrate of policies, and predictable regulations and legislation that makes it possible for businesses to operate. On top of that government picks up the costs that businesses externalize onto society as a whole, like education and safety and health care and basic research and infrastructure.

A few blunt examples for these corporate shills.

• When companies are starting up, Society provides them with educated talent, and serviced environments in which they can establish their operations. Companies never have to pay for the investments that all of us make in an educated workforce.
• Companies largely don’t have to worry about how their employees get to work. Roads, public transportation, and a well-regulated telecommunications system provides the predictability and ease that companies require for their employees.
• When economies change or companies go bankrupt, governments are the one that care for the aftermath. Workers are paid compensation, communities who are suffering, are provided resources and local governments take on the work of creating climate for sustained economic activity.

The many functions that governments provide to communities and regions, require them to operate with a continuity of care, especially to those that are the most vulnerable and require special assistance, like children, folks who are ill or disabled, elders requiring long-term care and others. Governments take on the collective responsibilities that are beyond the scope of any of us to care for on our own, including regulating our food supply, managing, and protecting the environment, and our natural resources, ensuring that we have a stable and predictable dispute resolution systems.

It is absolutely ridiculous to me that I’ve had to repeat these points to people that should otherwise know better.

A government‘s obligations are to provide stable and predictable continuity of care to a citizens. A business’ obligations are to provide an ever-increasing return to its shareholders. In fact, many of those advocating for a startup mentality to be applied to “government efficiencies“ don’t even see the irony of the fact that a startup’s purpose is to generate nearly unlimited growth. “Move fast and break things“ is a principle used to maximize profits and expansion in the early years of a startup. And yet some folks are unironically, wanting to apply this principle to government operations, where the thing that gets broken is people and communities and where moving fast threatens the very stability upon which businesses rely. And the cost of repairing those things arenot going to be covered by shareholders.

For my whole life, and especially during the years in which I work for the public service in Canada, I have had to constantly make this argument. It is so simple to understand the differences between business and government, and yet it is those who should know better but who like to project airs of confidence and confidence who seem so willing to conflate the two. I now look upon these folks as pure charlatans.

Understand the difference. The same nonsense may be coming to Canada again too. The metaphors of managing government like a business or, God forbid, a household budget, are not only unhelpful, but they are fundamentally dangerous, and if used to guide actual policy making will result in long-term damage from which people, communities, businesses, and countries may be unable to recover.