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Government is not a business or a household

ksen said:
so stop trying to run it like one because you are killing us

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2012/10/05/government-vs-business/
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The question should perhaps be inverted. Business should not attempt to run the country as a shadow government. Also, what we call "business" today is actually a finely tuned set of political machines whose who reason for being is the extraction of profits from the economy. The key to this whole phenomenon is the word EXTRACTION in a system which, in order to function properly must be a system of CIRCULATION. When you extract from a circulating system (the economy), that system simply shrinks. Our current economic system and indeed idealized business model is one of a system of cannibalistic parasitic ticks on the body politic, engineering for themselves bigger and ever more intrusive blood drilling equipment and rules for their operations.

What passes for "brilliant" business operation is actually just carefully devised skimming schemes. Yup, they even cover it in Forbes. The guyy who wrote this article no doubt needs to be investigated by Homeland (fatherland) Security. How dare he interfere with the "recovery!;)"
 
Generally agree. Whereas a business is to achieve its goals with the highest revenue possible, government should achieve its goals with the least revenue possible.
 
Trausti said:
Generally agree. Whereas a business is to achieve its goals with the highest revenue possible, government should achieve its goals with the least revenue possible.
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That isn't really true of either. The goal of business is not simply more revenue. If revenue is high but costs are higher, then there is negative profit. Increasing revenue relative to profit is a business goal. Of course, that isn't the only goal because "business" is an abstraction without real goals, and is just something that people do. Owning, running, and working for a business can serve a number of goals people have, only one of which is profit and profit can sometimes impede those other goals, so it is balanced against them. Ever increasing profits is only the goal of businesses run by people who care about nothing else (and thus are usually not very ethical people).

Generally, government should try to achieve goals without using more revenue than needed, but that means needed to satisfy all its various goals. Government goals in everything it does should also entail ethics, fairness, decency, and the social good, which very often require expenditures. For example, the government should not get roads built with slave labor just because it can. The ethics of paying the road builders a wage they can support a family on are as important as the goal of the road itself.
Actually, we should also expect businesses to act ethically and do more for others than the minimum they can get away with. The difference is that we should only set minimal legal requirements for such ethics, then cultural and socially hold them to a higher standard than what is minimally required. With government we should make the legal requirements and the cultural standard should be the same. For example, companies should be made to pay a minimum wage, but we should also socially (as consumers, and neighbors, and vocal community members) reward and punish companies that greedily always strive to never give more than they can get away with. People paid to perform government services should be required to be paid at more than the minimum that a business would be able to get away with.

Another example is in the methods of production. Government must do more than the minimum required of businesses to employ the most sustainable and least environmentally damaging methods in whatever they do. This is among the many reasons why it is better for government to have more direct control over such projects and how they are done, what suppliers are used etc., than to just contract it out to private industry. In sum, government must give much more weight to long term issues and to competing goals (including ethics) than business would be required or expected to do. This will inherently lead to more revenue required than would be required if the particular action (building a road) were built by a corporation who only cares about the net profit of a few people in the next few quarters and has no regard for who is harmed or how long the road lasts (in fact, they want it not to last, so people need to buy a new one).
 
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