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The government is not a business

It is way past due time to relegate to the dust bin of history’s terrible human ideas the inane suggestion that government should be run just like a business.

Businesses are in it for one purpose, and one purpose only.

To generate profit, period.

Government, meanwhile, exists not only to protect citizens, but also to provide crucial infrastructure and deliver services people depend on to be healthy, productive members of society.

So if anything, a government should be run similar to a non-profit model, which is to say providing programs and services at cost with no consideration for profit, with any unexpected surplus revenues generated allocated right back to reserve accounts to benefit future generations — not stock buybacks, dividends for shareholders or bonuses for overpaid executives.

Of course it should go without saying that a government at any level should always strive to maintain balanced budgets while maximizing every last dollar's potential. Knowing when to save during good times, to be better prepared to spend through the bad.

But that’s where the similarities end.

And eventually, people will start to reach the point — if they haven’t already — where they’re tired of incessantly and apparently unironically being condescendingly lectured to do more with less. Such patronizing political platitudes are completely disconnected from reality.

Many of us have for many long years — especially following the 2008-09 financial crisis and the 2014-15 ongoing oil crash — already been on frozen salaries with no cost of living adjustments, doing more with less year after year after year after year.

At a certain point, there is absolutely no more that can be done with less.

We simply find ourselves forced to do less, with less.

Salaries remain frozen, everything else gets more expensive, and somehow, everybody is magically expected to do more.

Everyone, of course, except for the super wealthy and disaster capitalists who salivate like a pack of hungry wolves ready to pounce during times of crisis and whose fortunes have in recent decades — and especially since the start of the pandemic — grown astronomically to obscenely unprecedented heights.

To be clear — because I’m tired of being erroneously accused of peddling the politics of envy — I’m not even remotely jealous of their wealth in the slightest. I already feel extremely fortunate to have what little I’ve got, knowing most of the rest of the world has far less, and cannot even begin to fathom the obsession of amassing sums of money that I could never possibly hope to spend in several lifetimes while so many people are forced to choose between paying rent or putting food on the table.

So, I repeat. It has nothing to do with jealousy.

Rather, I harbour nothing but contempt for bottomless, insatiable greed that causes grievous harm to society.

The pandemic has made painfully clear that when push comes to shove and the going gets tough, it’s our fellow, everyday citizens who have our backs. Our medical professionals and other essential frontline workers — from grocery store clerks and cashiers to truckers delivering supplies and so many others in between, including friends, family and neighbours.

Not the billionaires and multi-millionaires, who are comfortably insulated from our plight while they pretentiously pretend that “we’re all in this together.”

Greed is not — despite what no shortage of conservatives have been insisting since Ronald Reagan popularized the corrupt idea decades ago — good.

In fact, last I checked, it’s one of the seven deadly sins. Something about a camel having an easier time passing through the eye of a needle than the rich passing through the pearly gates.

There is on this Earth ample abundance to meet everyone’s needs.

But there will never be enough to satisfy the greed of the few.

So, it’s time to cast aside the notion that a government should be run like a business when it should be run like a benevolent non-profit, and to stop telling the struggling working class and disappearing middle class to do more with less while giving profitable, multi-billion-dollar corporations and the super wealthy one tax break after another.

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