In 1980 George McGovern lost his bid for the presidency and then a fourth term in the senate and returned to South Dakota deciding to open a bed and breakfast. It was then that one of Washington's leading progressives learned something about government. He said, “I wish that during the years I was in public service I had had this first-hand experience about the difficulties business people face.” While jumping through the hoops and wading through 100,000 pages of regulations, some of which he himself had helped to create, he realized that our government had become an anti-business colossus.
We assume that our founders created the constitution to protect us from evil, from bad government, from corruption. It was also designed to protect us from our own best intentions. The founders had the foresight to understand how a government’s best intentions lead to corruption, a crony capitalism that plays favorites and invites the pay to play kind of bribery that is rampant in Washington today.
CEOs of large corporations like Brad Anderson of Best Buy tell us that they benefit from government regulation. Those regulations inhibit competition. Large corporations have huge staffs and enough capital to wade through the morass and find ways to circumvent the law, ways to make the regulations work to their advantage. Their smaller competitors get lost in the quicksand.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, enacted after the Enron scandal, did nothing to prevent Bernie Madoff from ripping off the public, but it stymied the small start-up companies that do the most to fuel our economic engine. Dodd Frank adds another 2, 319 pages to the mess and has been called by economists “The Lawyers and Consultants Full Employment act of 2010.” So I guess Nancy Pelosi is correct. Government can create jobs.
Should business experience be a pre-requisite for politicians?
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