There is a lot of discussion around the world that politicians are not doing a great job of running the country and that we need professionals to do it. People who have experiences of running large organizations and managing gazillions of money become the first obvious choice for such a replacement and the most powerful democracy in the world seems to have given a nod to such an experiment. This sounds all good because the man has experience of running such a successful business,(except for when he went bankrupt for 5 times in last 10 years), over such a long period of time. What could go wrong?
So just to get a better understanding of things, let’s first understand the analogy between a business house and a government.
The head of the government is the head of the organization. The government departments are different units of the business house. The government officials are the employees and the citizens are the customers. The government tries to sell its governance in return for the tax which people pay. The bottom line is to increase profits and satisfy the customer demands. And if the customer is not happy, he can always complain or go to a different provider. Right? Right? Right?
Wrong! There are multiple inherent flaws in this analogy.
The most basic flaw is that citizens are not customers. In a democracy, citizens are not customers. They are the bosses. The government is functioning for the citizens. A business house’s motto and purpose can change over a period of time. Recently Microsoft changed its motto from “Put a computer on every desk in the world” to “Empowering every person and organization on this planet”. Blackberry went from a Mobile device manufacturer to a software company. However, imagine a government changing its motto and purpose from serving and governing the people.
Secondly, bottom line for a government is not to increase profits. Bottom line for a government is to ensure that all its citizens, irrespective of whether they pay their taxes or not should be provided with all the basic amenities. The job of a government also includes helping citizens in times of need through various welfare schemes and programmes to ensure that everyone can live their life in dignity.
Finally, if government starts running like a business house, it would inherently have a monopoly in its own industry inside a country. A non-satisfied customer would not have any competitor to avail similar services. From our experiences, we know having a monopoly is never a good idea. One may argue that people still can vote for the next person in the next election cycle. However, there is no checks and balances on the scams and powers of the corporation.
As a final note I would like to remind that India, as a country was run by a business house for over a 100 years and it took multiple revolutions and movements and two world wars for India to be finally getting a government running them instead of a business house.