Governments Look After People, Corps Look After Money
Listening to: Red World - Del Rey System
For a long time I have always maintained that corporations should not control national
health or education. This is not some lefty socialist thing… it’s just considering
the issue from a problem solving perspective. I think you get a “better”
health system if it is government run… by better I mean more “people oriented”.
Anecdotally a comparison of Canada and the US is enlightening… I am not saying that
privatization is the only contributor to the difference… but I would argue that
it is in the top five.
Corporations are crap at looking after people… but very good at looking after money.
I know this because I am involved in the day to day management of a company… you
are always faced with decisions that are made up of a person component and a profit
component. More often than not you are able to make a balance between the two… but
some times it is profit that wins out. The reality is that when you make a decision
in business profit (the bottom line) plays a huge role in that decision process…
how you add people to that mix is more based on your personal approach to the troops
than any particular monetary motive (there are always exceptions of course). The thing
about health and education are that they are intrinsically people heavy issues.
Governments, in turn, are somewhat better at after people (better in that they are
forced to make decisions that are composed more of “people”)… In a liberal
democratic society people play a large role in who is there (in parliament) and how
they got there. The decision makers are forced to make decisions on a time frame that
is great than the next 90 days (thou some would argue that the 3 year time frame is
still not long enough). These decisions are made with the constituency in mind.
I am not saying that governments are built properly for making people heavy decisions…
but what I am saying is that the decision making frameworks are vastly different.
The decision making framework for a corporation must place shareholder value
high up the scale. Governments must place voter needs high up the scale.
Intrinsically these lead to two different approaches to problems and two different
sets of acceptable decision pools. The key difference is the definition of “rational”
in both contexts. It only takes a week with the paper to realize that “rational”
is vastly different in both cases.
What sparked this little rant? This BBC World article on
why the markets have done very-well-thank-you in the wake of the Asian tidal wave.
