The idea that government should be more like a business is appealing to those whose education, experience and values are in the business world. People do see the world through the lens of their experiences and want to apply the methods they are most familiar with to as many areas as possible. For example, I am a philosophy professor and tend to see the world through the philosophical lens and want to apply critical thinking, logic and ethical reasoning whenever I can. Likewise, those who are educated and experienced in business see the world through a business lens and wish to broadly apply their business skills and methods.

A reasonable case can be made as to why a business focused approach has merit. One can point out that many skills developed in the context of business can be used in government. For example, negotiating and deal making skills can be applied to politics. As another example, business leadership and management skills can also be applied in government. It would be a mistake to claim that government is nothing like a business, but it can also be argued that it is mistaken to try to transform government into a business.

One mistake is to think that just because there are positive qualities of business that overlap with those of government, making government more like a business will thus make government better. Making one thing more like another only adds positive qualities if they are made alike in positive ways. Making them alike in other ways does not do this. For example, dressing like a runner makes one like a runner, but this does not confer the health benefits of running.

 There is also the fact that although things with similar positive qualities are similar, it does not follow they are otherwise alike in relevant ways. For example, efficiency is a positive quality of business and government, but merely making government like business does not necessarily make it more efficient. There are businesses that are very inefficient.

Also, the fact that efficiency can be a positive quality of both business and government does not mean they are alike in other ways or that the way business is made more efficient is the way to make government more efficient. To illustrate, a business might be very efficient at exploiting customers and workers while enriching the stockholders, but that is presumably not the sort of efficiency one should aim for in government.

Avoiding this mistake involves resisting the mythology and fetishizing of making things like businesses and giving due consideration to which skills, methods and approaches transfer well from business to government and which do not.

A second basic mistake is like that made by Ion in Plato’s dialogue Ion. The rhapsode Ion believes, at the start of the dialogue, that poets have knowledge and mastery about almost everything. His reasoning is that because poets write about, for example, military matters, they thus are experts in military matters. As such, poets should be able to teach people about everything and serve as leaders in all these areas.

Socrates shows that the poets (as poets) do not have such knowledge. The gist of his argument is that each area is mastered by mastering the subject of that area and all these areas “belong” to others and not to the poets. For example, knowledge of waging war belongs to soldiers. The poets touch but lightly on these other areas and understand only the appearances and not the depth. Socrates does note that a person can have multiple domains of mastery, so a medical doctor could, for example, also be skilled at mathematics or art history.

The error in the case of business is to think that because there are many types of business and almost everything has some connection to business, then an alleged mastery of business confers mastery over all these things. However, business skills are distinct from skills specific to types of businesses. To illustrate, while a manager might believe that their management skills are universal, managing a software company does not confer software skills nor does managing a hospital confer medical skills. One might pick up skills and knowledge, but this would not be as a businessperson. After all, while a businessperson might be a runner, that does not make running a business. The fact that there are businesses associated with running, such as Nike, does not entail that skill in business thus confers skill in running. As such, for someone to think that business skills thus confer mastery over government would be a mistake. They might believe that they have such mastery because government interacts with business and some businesses do things like what government does, but they would be as mistaken as someone who thinks that because they manage a Nike outlet, they are thus an athlete.