But Does Business Really Outperform Government?

[Joanne98]

There it was, 463 words into Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address: “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” With those words, spoken in 1981, a movement that had abscessed on the fringes of political chatter since the 1930s reclaimed power. The words meant nothing in themselves. Characteristic of Reagan’s copious plagiarism, they weren’t even new. They were a retread of the Harding-Coolige-Hoover slogan that “the business of America is business.”

Every “expansion of government in business,” Herbert Hoover had said, “poisons the very roots of liberalism — that is, political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press, and equality of opportunity.” That is, exactly the values reactionary Republicanism, aided by the courts it’d been packing since President McKinley’s day, clobbered as it turned the 1920s into “the most expensive orgy in history” (as F. Scott Fitzgerald would describe it in 1931, when the party was over), “the whole upper tenth living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of call girls.” That was before the orgies Reagan, that value-added conservative, unleashed in the 1980s, and that his dry-drunk ideological godson George W. Bush managed to squeeze in between two recessions. That they used government to underwrite their upper-class orgies while calling government names is among those elitist ironies men-of-the-people like Reagan and Bush chose not to consort with. It helps to live in the world of slogans.

But in the real world, is it really true that government is the problem, that business does it better than government? Not in my experience. Getting naturalized a citizen of this country was simpler than getting bogus charges taken off my cell phone account. Getting my passport or driver’s license or tags renewed has always been more pleasant and efficient than dealing with the cable company (long since abandoned). Filing taxes? Give me that over dealing with health insurers any day. At least with tax returns, I usually get money back. Insurers just garnishee my wages and shave years off my life. I envy my parents’ comparatively non-existent Medicare bureaucracy, and their complete freedom to choose what doctor they please — up to and including the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, which I’d have to pay for on top of the $5,000 I pay in private health insurance premiums for me and my family for often mediocre services and artery-clogging bureaucratic grief. Seems to me private-sector insurance is the problem here, and government the demonstrable solution.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/29/8602/

[Hannah Bell]

1. Compare the regulated airlines to the non-regulated mess &

bankruptcies we have now. Reductions in safety inspections, reductions in wages, reductions in seat size...