Yeah, I have to say, I heard so much growing up, from adults, always saying stuff about how they want the government “run like a business”. Now that I’m grown, and I’ve seen the various pathologies of businesses first hand, I question whether any of those people really understood their meaning.
Just off the top of my head here’s a list of what that it means to run something like a business: enshitification, make everything a subscription, policies implemented by bots that can not be appealed, dark pattern UI, force people to give up their data by saying it’s necessary and then sell their data, train AI on copyrighted data if it means a snowball’s chance in hell that you can fire your employees, but do this only after spending decades harassing people who think there should essentially be a global library (call it “piracy!”), customer’s don’t own or control their devices, make healthcare about profit, give bailouts to businesses that simply were bad at their core competencies, and I could go on… so could anyone else on HN.
The truth is there is simply more to life than the bottom line, but that no longer stands to be the case when you run the country like a business… because that is the point of the business (the bottom line). Regardless, even if you believe the contrary, that there is nothing else in life beyond the bottom line, then the question remains at how many businesses are simply awful at what they purport to do.
Why anyone would want to exchange the system that has created the most prosperous nation in history for the likes of those who can only compete by not charging for their product is beyond my comprehension. Something tells me though that the issue at hand is not that we, as in the USA, are lacking in prosperity but something deeper and that’s the real reason why everyone’s searching for change.
I won’t be the one to say what it is, as I’d much rather hear what other people think, but I do want to beg the question. Perhaps there is a deeper problem, and perhaps we’re being guided to embrace a solution that will actually make things much worse for most.