Economic Realities: Selling the Notion of Government as Business

Up till about the 1980s governments, like the one in Canada, often invested large amounts of capital in infrastructure, job creation programs, and assisting citizens in realizing their dreams. On the heels of the Regan revolution in America, in the 1990s the debt from big government had become a focus of the public in Canada and a new era of fiscal responsibility was ushered in. The story was the same elsewhere in the West and eventually in the developing world, too. I want to challenge the idea that government is essentially a business providing services or should be.

Entire populations voted for regimes that made their life more difficult: reducing social services, constraining access to education, and limiting opportunities for entrepreneurship. Consider the arguments that convinced us to pay down the government’s debt. We were told that government, like ourselves, must “manage its house”, “live within its means”, and so on. There was, also, the disdain for big governments, regulations, and all the roadblocks to doing business. In addition, the collapse of the former Soviet Union was to be proof that “socialism does not work”. There was the reality that debt was costing taxpayers in vast sums of interest payments, too.

The notion that government must manage its resources as its premier activity became so pervasive that a string of liberal governments in Canada and America did little more than implement a fiscally conservative agenda, while maintaining their socially progressive stripes. Governments surpluses abounded, even from programs like unemployment insurance. Services designed to help people are doing less good for citizens and merely turning profits for the state.

We have been loosing jobs and social services, working longer hours for less, as well as, there is the breakdown of relationships under financial stress. Our televisions are filled with advertisements for anti-depressants, but we do not find it odd; the problems, we have come to think, are in our heads. Faced with globalization, new technologies, the post-industrial economy was peddled by liberals and conservatives alike as a reality. The anti-globalization dissenters were too far on the fringes to offer an alternative.

Yet the wheel of the economy has changed, I submit, into something that no longer serves the vast majority of citizens even in affluent countries. I am not sure to what extent we are able to control our destiny in the face of technological and global changes. We can, however, at least try to mitigate the effects of global changes to retain some humanity. Government is more than just a business. The leaders of a nation should attempt to promote and defend our most cherished values, like human rights. They should plan for a world we want.