What could be more logical?
Surely it makes a lot of sense for political leaders to have been
business leaders. After all they are
used to running large companies with many layers management and workers. Don’t they make important business decisions
every day? The recent elections of
Donald Trump and Doug Ford certainly shows that people think business leaders
will make the best political leaders and are willing to bet the future fortunes
of their countries or provinces on that fact.
Well maybe it’s not that good an idea after all.
Business executives love power. They are in business to make money, to make a
product or supply a service for profit, and most of all to make sure their
company’s shares continue to rise. They
answer only to a Board of Directors who are all like minded individuals. Their workers and customers are only there to
contribute to profit and rising share prices.
They are used to power to make unilateral decisions with little or
preferably no opposition. They are, in
their own way, dictators. When they enter politics as leaders (for many would
not enter under any other circumstance), they expect to be treated the same
way; unopposed, dictatorial and rewarded (I bring to your attention the cover
of Time Magazine for the week or 20 June 2018). To them, the role of business
is business.
“Whenever
you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.”
However, as any good politician will tell you, the role of
government is people. People are
citizens, tax payers, voters for whom the politician serves. To a good politician, people are people: to a
business leader people are resources (it is a lot easier to discard resources
than fire people). Politicians answer
to no Board of Directors but to voters who can remove the politician at the
next election, or in some cases before.
There is no question that there have been, and continues to be, bad
politicians. But if the electorate do
their job, bad politicians don’t last long.
There should be no such thing as a ‘safe’ seat.
Which brings me to the next part. There is an important role for voters in a
democracy. It is to decide who represent
them and who is the leader that leads them.
Voters who do not understand this are not doing their part. We get no say about who runs big or small
corporations. Not unless we are
significant stock holders and of course, very few of us are. But we do get a say about who leads us. In most cases, businessmen and women don’t
understand that. They think that their
power in the boardroom will translate into power in a government. They forget that their power comes from the
people, not from their cronies in the boardroom.
“In democracy it's your vote that counts; in feudalism
it's your count that votes.”
To the best of my knowledge and the reading of history, there
has never been a successful political leader who has come straight from business. Those that have been successful have worked
their way up the political ladder before become leader and who have proven
their worth as a politician.
“The Constitution gives every American the inalienable
right to make a damn fool of himself.”
