Marty Robins:
If Washington seems out of ideas on how to get the private-sector jobs machine running again, there's a pretty straightforward reason -- the people in government have virtually no experience in business.
In a major departure from prior administrations, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in the current administration with any real business experience. Even offices such as treasury and commerce secretary, which have traditionally been occupied by successful business people, are occupied by a career central banker (with his own tax-compliance problems) and a lawyer/politician.
The situation is little different in Congress, where the "barons" -- Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, Waxman, Reid, Rangel -- are all career "public servants."
This increasing disconnect between the government and the business world is a big, if unrecognized, problem, if for no other reason than that it deprives government officials of the knowledge and experience that successful business leaders can bring to solving difficult problems.
In my day job as a corporate attorney, drafting and negotiating numerous business contracts, I see men and women grappling with real-world business problems and coming up with real-world solutions. The solutions aren't always elegant and sometimes they don't work at all, but they represent the best efforts of all concerned to use the resources they have, often implementing new technologies or methodologies or using old ones for new purposes, to bring about a positive result.
Contrast this with the efforts of government, which increasingly today consist of saying "no," "you must," "you're liable" or "you've got to help someone else." Whether the issue is medical coverage, trade policy, credit or loan structure and pricing, car propulsion systems or something else, we have government acting more and more as czar or cop, telling business what it must or must not do and getting in the way of transactions that would otherwise happen.
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In place of people with business experience we have not only professional politicians, but academics who have theories, but not first hand experience either. Being a
community organizer does not give you the experience to run the government or a business. Would you hire a community organizer to run your business?
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