"Business people tend to do a very bad job at governing. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
both came from business backgrounds. They left the country in the worst financial shape since the Great Depression. Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts was 47th out of the 50 states for job creation."
This article lists the nine reasons for some of this:
1. Companies are in business for one reason and one reason only…to make money. They are not in business to serve their employees or even their customers. A corporation is legally obligated to put profit above all else. This philosophy typically boils down to making the cheapest product the market will allow (or offering the least amount of service) and selling it at the highest price the market will allow. It’s one thing if your cell phone has a built in life span of six months to two years. It’s quite another for the electrical power grid.
2. Businesses do not care about their customers. I know. That statement is a little cold. They spend billions in advertising convincing us that they care about us. They truly want us to have clean clothes. They want us to have a clean environment. They want your children to frolic in fields. They sell you that toy just so your child can see you as the hero you are. They want you to be happy. Actually, no where in the corporate charter does it talk about customer happiness or even customer satisfaction. Sure, if a competitor is making their customers happy, there might be some incentive to go in that direction, but ultimately, it’s about the shareholders and only the shareholders. It’s easier and cheaper to improve the marketing than it is to improve the product or service. In other words, it’s fine to sell defective products, as long as they can manipulate a certain percentage of the people into believing they are buying a good product at a good price, their shareholders are happy. If the marketing campaign is really good, they will convince their customers that product defects are normal (as with many electronics) and that they should pay to replace their defective product with the next generation of the very same defective product.
3. The government is not in the business of turning a profit. Let’s use the post office as an example. Granted, the post office isn’t doing that great right now, but the reason for that is pretty simple. They aren’t charging enough and they were forced to fund their retirement pensions for far longer than any other organization, public or private. But let’s say they were doing well. Let’s say they were profitable. Customers would be screaming. We would want that money back in the form of cheaper postage stamps. In fact, wasn’t that the entire premise behind the Bush tax cuts? The government had a surplus of funds. Bush and the Republicans felt it should go back to the taxpayers.
4. The government is not in the business of creating demand. By and large, government services are services deemed necessary for our society to function. Businesses spring up every day by creating new demands for new products. Pharmaceutical companies invent illnesses. Clothing manufacturers convince us that we are somehow inferior if we are caught wearing last year’s styles. Governments pick up trash, teach children and put out fires. They have no incentive to have us create more trash, make dumber children or start fires. On the other hand, if those same services were run by business, the more trash they picked up, the more money they would earn. The more work they had to put into educating our children, the more money they would earn. The more fires they had to put out, the more money they would earn.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/05/12/9-reasons-why-business-people-are-terrible-at-governing/
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