Business and Government in a Petri Dish

By this point in modern American history the “great experiment” of government economic and social planning verses private sector/business should have proven to all that, on the whole, to be a great failure!

MasterPo isn’t going to list all the reasons that are so often listed on other sites. But there is one significant difference between the plans of government and the plans of business.

Government can create a plan (program), allocate funds that typically means borrowing which is fine, then projects that 5 years (or whatever time frame) the results (return) will be whatever.

Business often does the same thing.

But…

When a business starts project, borrows money to pay for it, makes a time line projection as to the return on the project, if at that future time the project doesn’t yield the return expected or fails in total the business takes a big hit! Maybe even goes out of business if the risk was so high. (Realistically, the business isn’t waiting until whatever future time, it already knows long before then if the project is doing well or not and may cancel the project is things don’t go as well as expected.)

By contrast, with government when the future time comes no one even bothers to look back and see if the program returned anywhere near what the claim was at the start. And more over, any return, even a mere 1% or less is deemed “successful” and therefore justifies the expense and resources expended. So all the money borrowed for the program that wasn’t made back just gets dumped on the ever growing pile of the national debt. There are no ramifications for those who proposed the program, voted for it, implemented it, managed it etc. No one gets fired. No one gets sued. No one even gets called before a committee to explain the failure. Just life goes on willy-nilly.

What business could survive doing that?! None. And that’s why government can’t be deemed a player, a “competitor”, in the business environment. Government can operate for years, decades even, at a loss without serious ramifications to those involved. Now we are finally seeing the weight of all that spending and Devil-may-care lack of planning and review. But even still, who is being taken to task officially for it? Who lost their job and reputations in disgrace? Who went to jail?! No one.

Government’s ability to borrow money pretty much at will and with few limits (Federal level at least) or print money (Federal) makes it the ultimate anti-competition entity in the universe! No private for-profit organization (and many non-government not-for-profit organizations too) can compete for years much less decades with such an entity under those conditions.

No business ever welcomed help from the government. The same can be said for government “competition”.