One of the most important distinctions we can make about government is also one of the easiest to overlook: government is not a business.
That sounds obvious, but an enormous amount of our political thinking is built around the opposite assumption. We routinely praise politicians for being good businesspeople, talk about government as though it should be run like a corporation, and evaluate public programs according to concepts like efficiency, profitability, and market share.
Those concepts have their place. They are just not enough when the thing we’re managing is a society.
A business can decide that part of its potential market is not worth pursuing. If 70 percent of the market is profitable and 30 percent isn’t, a company can focus on the 70 percent. That’s how business works.
Government doesn’t have that luxury.
If 70 percent of the population is doing well while the other 30 percent is struggling to survive, government can’t simply write off the 30 percent as an inefficient use of resources. Those people are still citizens. They still matter. Their humanity doesn’t become less important because serving them isn’t profitable.
That distinction helps explain a lot of what we’re seeing in America right now.
When Efficiency Becomes the Wrong Goal
The conversation turned to everything from disaster relief and policing to health care and private prisons, but the underlying issue was the same: what happens when we apply business logic to public institutions?
Consider disaster response. Recent flooding in states such as Texas and Indiana has highlighted what happens when communities don’t have adequate infrastructure or when government systems fail to respond effectively. The question shouldn’t be whether helping those people produces a return on investment. The question should be whether we have built a system capable of helping citizens when disaster strikes.
The same principle applies to health care.
A private business can decide that someone isn’t a profitable customer. A government cannot ethically make the same calculation about whether one of its citizens deserves access to basic medical care.
The same problem becomes even more obvious when we talk about criminal justice. If a private prison makes money by keeping people incarcerated, the financial incentive is fundamentally different from the public interest in determining who actually belongs in prison. When profit becomes part of the equation, human beings can become numbers on a spreadsheet.
That’s the danger of allowing corporate thinking to become the default framework for public policy.
We Don’t Need to Be “Colorblind”
The conversation also turned toward racism and the persistent idea that America has somehow become a “colorblind” society.
We haven’t.
The problem with colorblindness isn’t the idea that everyone should be treated equally. Obviously, they should. The problem is pretending that people already experience America equally simply because we declare that they should.
The transcript’s discussion of racial disparities in policing, historical discrimination, and the concept of whiteness as the societal “default” illustrates why ignoring differences can actually make inequality harder to recognize.
Equality requires us to see where people are experiencing different realities. If we refuse to acknowledge those differences, we can’t correct them.
That doesn’t mean abandoning the goal of equal treatment. It means taking the goal seriously enough to recognize when the system isn’t delivering it.
We Can’t Keep Going Backward
This brings us to what I think may be the most important point of the entire conversation.
There is a powerful political instinct to “go back” to a time when America supposedly worked better. But if the systems of the past were sufficient, we wouldn’t be dealing with the problems we have today.
Going backward doesn’t solve structural problems. It recreates the conditions that produced them.
We’ve spent decades moving back and forth between political parties, with one side dismantling programs and the other attempting to repair them, only for the cycle to begin again. The result is not progress. It’s an endless political loop.
We need to stop asking how we can restore the past and start asking what we need to build next.
That means taking health care seriously. It means investing in education. It means making it possible for ordinary people to afford housing, food, and a decent life. It means creating institutions that actually protect people rather than simply assuming the market will eventually solve every problem.
And it means recognizing that none of this is inherently radical.
The basic question is remarkably simple:
What is government for?
If the answer is to protect the rights and well-being of the people who make up this country, then our systems should be designed around human beings—not around maximizing profits, protecting institutions for their own sake, or serving whoever already has the most power.
We aren’t going to fix every problem with one election. We aren’t going to eliminate racism, poverty, corruption, or inequality overnight.
But we can vote for systems that make those problems easier to confront rather than harder.
We can choose leaders who understand that running a country is fundamentally different from running a corporation.
And most importantly, we can stop trying to get back to a past that never actually worked for everyone.
The goal shouldn’t be to go back. It should be to build something better.
ChatGPT was used to format our recorded transcript into a blog post.
