A Boss or a President: Part II

It is not the aim of business man to provide jobs.
Business men are in business to make money, not provide jobs.

Very often, in order to make money, a business will make jobs,
but if the same goods or services could be provided by
automated programs or machinery, for less money, the boss
would buy the machinery: automated factory floors, for instance.

We have a name for it: "productivity".
Productivity is a measure of how many people it takes
to get the job done. "American workers," the Boss likes to say,
are the most productive workers in the world.
What he or she really means is that we can get by\
with the smallest number of workers to get the job done.
We have replaced workers with computer-controlled machines.

It is not the aim of a President to make money.
The aim of a President is to put people to work,
or if not to work, to share in the common good.
People who are not working are a burden to the rest of us.
President have to think of jobs first.

So when James Lipton asks if we want to elect
a Boss or a President, he wants to whether the aim
of government is to make money or to provide work.

Those two things meet somewhere, but not easily,
and not simple-mindedly. A balanced national budget
is small comfort to families without jobs.

Calvin Coolidge said that, "The business of government
is business." He was wrong. The business of business
is business. Government is about the common welfare.
Government is about all those people; how they are doing.

To govern is to insure that it all works, for us all.

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