Governments should not be run like a business

Brian Topp, The Globe and Mail:

Ireland is negotiating a potential €80-billion bailout that will socialize a decade of reckless irresponsibility in its private-sector banking and real-estate markets. Ireland's public sector – its social services, education, health care and infrastructure – is therefore going into trusteeship to pay for the incompetence and greed of its private sector. A key trustee will be the former colonial oppressor, Britain. Another will be Germany. So there will be King and Kaiser in Ireland's future after all.

This is what happens when a nation takes the advice to “run like a business” a little too exuberantly. It is what the conservative agenda looks like, played out to its end.

The state is awash in debt (thanks in part to excessive tax cuts); the deregulated private sector has gorged itself in an orgy of speculative greed, and finally expired in a property and banking bubble; and now the working and middle class – and their children, and their grandchildren – get to pick up the tab while the winners enjoy their properties in the Grand Caymans. Nobody in Ireland stood up to the special interests. They “ran like a business.” Now the bill has come due.

These are the real stakes between those who work for moderate, prudent, incremental progressive government, moving forward within its means in the public interest, and the other side – the mouthpieces for greed and reckless irresponsibility. The shills and charlatans of the populist right, and those who fund them.

Ireland gave itself to them and is paying the price – another chapter in its national tragedy. The rest of us would do well to learn from this. It's a lesson we have danced close to in a number of Canadian jurisdictions already.

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