Lynn McAlister UE 
@erin This whole philosophy - that government should function like business - just drives me crazy. Businesses serve consumers and their purpose is profit. Government serves citizens, whether it's profitable or not. Treating citizens as if they are exclusively consumers will never put us in a better spot in any way.
GaryC@lmgenealogy @erin Right?? Business earns and keeps money - Government collects and distributes money. Not the same thing. LOL Anyone advising running the government like a business, is admitting they either don't know what governments do, or they are pro corruption cronies.
@garyc @erin Neoliberalism has trained a huge percentage of the population to believe that everything should be ruled by markets. Once that's your baseline, the idea of *anything* existing without a profit motive is incomprehensible. (Public libraries really bother them - people's tax money, actually helping people? With nobody getting rich? How can that be allowed?!) The thought that some things should exist simply to make people's lives better is hard for the late capitalist mind to grasp.
@lmgenealogy @erin I think the liberal concept of free trade/market capitalism is unfairly getting lumped in with the (mostly American) concept of business capitalism. The American system likes to focus on doing whatever is good for businesses. Businesses should not have rights - that's for individuals.
@garyc @erin What I'm talking about is a mindset I saw just as clearly pushed by Maggie Thatcher and her political descendants as by her American fellow travellers. It's less market capitalism than no-limits-on-the-market capitalism. Privatize everything, eliminate as many regulations as possible, and render the social safety net obsolete, and society will be happy and prosperous. The flavour is slightly different in the US than elsewhere, but it's the same poison.