There’s still a few days left to go in May, but it’s been such an eventful month already that I know very clearly what I want to talk about…the myth that business people can magically run a more lean and efficient government than those trained in government and politics.

Rooted in our capitalist society, this myth has been around since at least the Industrial Revolution, when the likes of JP Morgan and the rest of the Robber Barons started to feel their stratospheric wealth and position granted them the ability to push government around, both in the news media of the time, in private dealings with government officials, and through campaign donations.

As the saying goes, prostitution is the world’s oldest profession and politics is the second oldest. So it should be no surprise that once business people began to accumulate vast wealth, that corruption in government, which has always existed, would explode as well.

Thankfully, politics does follow similar principles as physics, and for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction, although sometimes very delayed, so over our history we have seen past generations stand against corruption.

Yet, the sad truth is that the people get beat down by the constant onslaught of the news and scandals, such that it deadens the sensitivities of many citizens….which is what the economic royalists as FDR called them are counting on even today.

Early in my working career the credit manager for a large nationwide appliance company that was a client of the company I worked for told me something I’ve never forgotten…”every company that has ever existed has eventually gone out of business.”

Another client once told me “lots of companies survive in spite of themselves”.

Countries do not have those luxuries. Superpowers definitely do not have those luxuries.

This month I’ve had to deal with not one, not two, but three companies with very poor customer service, and during those experiences I kept thinking to myself that if government services were run this way, people would be up in arms.

I lost count of how many customer service representatives I had to speak to (it was somewhere between 6 and 10) with the phone company over 10 days and 7+ hours (half of which was being put on hold and listening to elevator music) while trying to resolve a thorny problem (unsuccessfully I might add).

Then add to that finding out that one of the companies we bought a car from still had a lien on the car even though it was fully paid for 16 months ago, and trying multiple times for 3 weeks to even get someone to respond and remove the lien so we could get a paper copy of the title.

Finally, imagine if a citizen had an appointment scheduled with a government agency only to have it get canceled and no one tell them about it and they just happened to find out by contacting the agency themselves. That happened with a third company we’ve been a client of for over 21 years.

For many years the slogan “the customer is always right” has been bandied about, to the point that we all seem to think naively that every company agrees with that and has as the sole focus of their business making the customer happy. But this is not the case. Companies exist to make their owners money. Period. Full stop.

Good companies, successful companies, companies that survive for the long term, know that the best way to make a lot of money is to keep the customers happy. But it’s not a given that every company you or I interact with is a good company or one that will be surviving for the long term.

And given those 3 customer service experiences above, I will be shocked if 100 years from now any of those 3 will still be in business.

Government on the other hand exists solely to keep its customers, its citizens, happy. One aspect of that is the quality of customer service and achieving results for the citizen.

Of course every citizen wants to know their tax dollars are not being wasted or abused, but it is a secondary concern to feeling like they themselves are getting value for the price paid.

In short, wholesale and indiscriminate cuts is not only not smart business, it’s not good government either. There’s a reason why surgeons use scalpels instead of axes or chainsaws to operate on patients.

And just like it takes years or decades to recover (if at all) from botched surgeries, it will take multiple successive terms of good government and best practices to undo the damage both in performance and perception of government services that this administration has and will continue to inflict on the American people.

The question is, will our voters be patient patients enough to allow that healing process to begin and sustain it through multiple elections in our hyperpartisan times?