A COUNTRY is not a COMPANY: CEOs Should Sit Down And Shut Up

[marmar]

from the Working Life blog:



A COUNTRY is not a COMPANY: CEOs Should Sit Down And Shut Up

by Jonathan Tasini
Monday 12 of September, 2011


I am continuously amazed by the reverence accorded company bosses. Put aside the incompetent ones, who get huge severance packages when they leave, or those who have looted their companies of tens of millions of dollars in pay and benefits, even when the companies lose money or collapse. I'm talking about even the ones who oversee profitable companies.

Why would anyone think that a CEO knows how to run a country? A country is not a company, as Paul Krugman wrote many years ago.

I'm struck by this point today because of three different public pleas by CEOs who essentially say, "the country is screwed up, I know what's best so listen to me...you fools". I'll come back to the pleas in a moment. First, to Krugman.

Back in 1996, Krugman wrote a trenchant article entitled, "A Country Is Not A Company" (which was published as a short book). The beginning of the book is on the mark:

What people learn from running a business won’t help them formulate economic policy. A country is not a big corporation. The habits of mind that make a great business leader are not, in general, those that make a great economic analyst; an executive who has made $1 billion is rarely the right person to turn to for advice about a $6 trillion economy.

..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.workinglife.org/blogs/view_post.php?content_id=15290

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[geckosfeet]

2. Good read. Many salient points. Ex. A 'highly paid executive' gets a huge bonus

for setting up tax shelters in order to keep his company from paying taxes. The tax burden must be then be shifted to individual taxpayers - among other options.

Q - How does this play out if the 'highly paid executive' methods are transferred to government? God knows the 'highly paid executive' itself would never work for government (no money in it), but consider if the government adopted this one simple business principle - avoid paying taxes. How does that play out?

[RKP5637]

3. K&R!!! n/t

[BeyondGeography]

4. Pathetic that it needs to be said at all

But it does, and he says it well.

[aquart]

5. YOU CANNOT FIRE YOUR CITIZENS.

Seriously, they don't ever seem to get that.

[progressoid]

11. After listening to "let him die" at the GOP debate, I think they are trying to find a way around

that little problem. :banghead:

[Waiting For Everyman]

6. That CEO-schtick always gets on my nerves, because it's so wrong.

It's part of the current, unquestioned propaganda. T.y. for posting this, and I'm glad to see this article written and the cite to Krugman's earlier piece, which bears repeating.

A (glorified) manager is not a leader, those are two different things. Being rich today doesn't mean someone is so brilliant or particularly talented, it mostly means being lucky, or corrupt, or usually both. Besides the points raised in the article, a CEO has the very same conflict of interest as a lobbyist, only worse.

These are also reasons why billionaires like Gates should not be influencing education.

Imo, the rich are too dumb, too incompetent, and too unethical to have anywhere near the power they do today. Tax those jokers back into their proper scale, I say! Their control and influence is way too overblown, and that's a large part of all the problems we are facing. It's easy to see today that allowing absurd wealth is bad public policy, and the rich have proven by their actions in recent years that they don't even begin to get why. They have no concept of limits, or "too much", or going "too far". Their thinking process, especially today, is "do whatever you can get away with" and "there's no such thing as self-control or self-limitation". They self-enrich with no let-up until they're focibly stopped, with no regard even for common sense.

To paraphrase Reagan, they are not the solution they are the problem.

[HughBeaumont]

7. K & R . . . one paragraph from that article . . .

. . . . can pretty much sum up why no CEO should be anywhere NEAR public policy.

This argument is elegant and simple--and does not even take into account the most obvious reason not to put economic policy in the hands of business executives: today's CEOs generally are not interested in the plight of their workers, the middle-class or the poor.

[Tippy]

8. K&R.....Krugman was spot on then, as he is today.....

[woo me with science]

9. K&R

[Hydra]

10. Excellent article

Especially this part:

To sum up: it is just foolish to believe that CEOs have any clue how to run a country. The only reason, in real life, that they have any megaphone is simply because they can buy it--either full-page ads, or think-tank loyalty, or literally by writing checks in our legalized system of electoral bribery of our politicians.

Anybody else notice that the voices of insanity all have a lot of money lately? Funny how that happened...

[txwhitedove]

12. K&R