Marlene Thomas sat down on the park bench beside me and sighed.
"So," I asked, "what's bothering you?"
Her shoulders slumped a little and she sighed again.
"It's so frustrating," she said, "to listen to so many elected officials blather on and on about how we have to run government like a business. It just makes me want to scream."
I nodded.
"I don't know how many times I heard that when I was covering politicians," I said. "I'd always follow up that statement with a question: 'How, exactly, should we do that?' No one ever had an answer. It was always just something that fell out of their mouths because they thought it sounded good to voters."
Marlene, one of the principal characters in my political mystery novel "The Session," seemed surprised.
"Really? You mean they didn't have any idea how to run government like a business?" she asked.
"Not one of them," I replied. "And I covered politics in Albany, Tallahassee, Dover, and Washington, D.C."
Marlene shook her head.
"Would you like to know how to do that? Run government like a business, I mean," she said.
"Sure," I replied.
"Okay," she said, "here's how it would work."
She reached into her purse and pulled out a notepad and a pencil. With quick strokes, she sketched an outline of the United States.
"In the first place," she said, "let's assume the U.S. is a Fortune 500 corporation. The President is the CEO and Congress is the board of directors. The federal judiciary is the corporate legal team. With me so far?"
"Yes," I said.
"Now, we won't go way back into history but if we did I'd start with the Civil War. After the Union defeated the Confederacy any good CEO would have suspended or fired employees who were that insubordinate. In the case of our fictional corporation, that would have meant stripping the people in those states that were part of the rebellion of their rights as citizens. In essence, they'd be living in territories under U.S. supervision in the same way, for example, that the citizens of Puerto Rico do. That means people in those states cannot vote in national elections and they can only send non-voting members to Congress."
"So," I said, "they'd be treated as second-class citizens?"
"Exactly," Marlene said.
"But," she added, "we all know that's not what happened. Instead, the federal government has poured billions upon billions of dollars into the South over several generations and Southerners like Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter were even elected President. Tell me that would have happened at a mega-corporation."
I shook my head.
"It wouldn't have," I said.
Marlene, who is a state Legislator in my novel "The Session," used her pencil to draw a square around what would be the states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
"So, instead of going back to the 1860s, we go back only 50 years," she said. "If we do a cost/benefit analysis of these three states we see that the federal government gives them many times more money than it gets from them in taxes. We build highways, bridges, maintain military bases, and what do we get in return?"
I shook my head.
"I don't know exactly," I said.
"Very little," Marlene said, "and every time a hurricane hits one or all of these places, we're stuck with huge reconstruction costs."
"So?" I asked.
"So if I was the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation I'd sell them off. And even if I didn't want to, my board of directors would demand that I did. They're sucking up huge amounts of money from the bottom line while contributing very little. They'd have to go."
"If," I said, "the government was run like a business, you mean."
"Yes, if the government was run like a business we'd revoke their status as states. We'd take away their right to vote and stop pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into states that consistently rank among the lowest in education as well as health care for the poor and middle class."
"That's harsh," I said.
"No," Marlene said, "that's business."
I thought back to my days as a reporter in Delaware when the DuPont Corporation sold off many of its low-performing businesses.
"I see what you mean," I said.
"There'd be another, hidden benefit, if we did that," Marlene said.
"Oh?"
"Yes," she said. "Other states that are in the same boat would likely start making improvements in their social and health care programs. They'd likely start doing all they could to prove to the rest of the country that they are worth keeping around as states. They'd boost their state tax rates so they could actually start paying for infrastructure work they need rather than whining to the federal government about their bad roads and bridges. They'd start cleaning up their own environmental messes rather than asking Washington to do it."
"That wouldn't be such a bad thing," I said.
"No, not on the surface it wouldn't. However," Marlene said, "the United States is not a Fortune 500 corporation and government isn't designed to run like a business.
"Government exists to meet the country's needs whether that means providing for a common defense or taking care of its poorest citizens. It is supposed to protect the people from harm and that includes protecting them from sleazy businesses that try to rip innocent people off or pollute our rivers and lakes. Government's only true purpose is to serve the people who pay taxes so that it can, in fact, serve the people - all of the people - who live and work in this country."
I nodded.
"You've convinced me," I said, smiling.
She smiled back.
"Now, if we could only convince those blowhards in Washington, then maybe we could move on and do some real work for the people who pay their salaries," she said.
"We live in hope," I said.
"Yeah," she said, "but let's also hope we don't die in despair..."

To read more about Marlene Thomas in "The Session," visit Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DVXID0W

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