NPR: Is Business More Nimble And More Effective Than Government?

How did we get to this point, where NPR asks a "capitalism expert" this question?  The intro was that corporations were cutting off campaign contributions to legislators who supported Trump's big lie about the election and the insurrection. 

"SACHA PFEIFFER, BYLINE: I want to reel off some of the ways that the corporate hammer has been coming down recently. We saw Dominion and Smartmatic sue former President Trump's allies for lying about their voting machines. We saw companies, including American Express and Morgan Stanley, suspending their donations to key Republican lawmakers. The PGA pulled its tournament from a Trump golf resort. I see this happen, and it makes me think that the corporate response to political controversy has been more nimble and possibly more effective than the government one - effective if you disagree with what these politicians were doing. Am I fair to view it that way?"

Here's a link to the whole piece. 

Let's start with the most obvious thing that Sacha Pfeiffer missed here.   The very fact that she points to corporations withdrawing campaign funding from politicians who supported the lies, should have tipped her off to the answer:   politicians aren't independent of their corporate funders.  

Maybe a better question would have been, "Why didn't the corporations let the politicians know they disapproved of the ex-president's lies and fomenting an insurrection before the impeachment votes?"

Sacha Pfeiffer also conflated elected federal officials with government.  They are just one, small, if powerful, part of the vast  federal government. But these are elected officials, not the people who actually carry out government functions.  These corporations got most of the Republican House and Senate members AND the president elected in the first place.  But the career employees of the government - whether in the CDC or other health agencies, or in the State Department, or in the military, or the post office  have been doing their best to keep serving the people of the United States, despite the corporate funded politicians.

And, as I've pointed out here before, there are many, many governments in the US.  From Wikipedia:

Governments in the United States[1] (not including insular areas)
Type	Number
Federal	1
State	50
County	3,034
Municipal (city, town, village...) *	19,429
Township (in some states called Town) **	16,504
School district	13,506
Special purpose (utility, fire, police, library, etc.)	35,052
Total	87,576

For NPR to seriously pose the basic question "Is business more effective than government?' shows us how far to the Right NPR has moved.  This is the argument conservatives have been making for years. It's their argument for making government as small as possible. And yes, corporations can be more nimble than governments at many decisions, simply because one person has the power to decide:  a CEO supported by a Board of Directors who picked him (I use the male pronoun because that's still the vast majority and yes it can be more complicated than that).  The US House has 435 people and the Senate 100 who all have an equal vote in every decision.  And businesses and governments have very different goals.  One goal of government is to provide those things that corporate America can't - like take care of the people who don't have the money to purchase corporate America's products, from food, to health care, to housing.  

There's lots and lots of things to discuss on this topic, but trying to focus directly on this particular segment, my last issue is that Sacha Pfeiffer turned to a person she described as a 'capitalism expert."  Why?  Why not have a different kind of economist?  Why not ask a 'government expert?" Why not have more than one person to respond?   I don't know what else her expert said that got cut out, but I would reiterate the most glaring omission:

The corporations can make these decisions faster than the politicians because corporations own most if not all of the Republican Senators and House members (and at least a part of many Democrats.)  

The fact that they can have an effect by withdrawing their campaign funding should make this point obvious.  

The real question should have been: why didn't they tell their political shills what they wanted before the politicians voted on Saturday? 

The 'capitalism expert' probably hinted at the answer to this unasked question when he said, they act on profits, not principles.  I'd guess they didn't know how all this was going to play out.  So they didn't know until it was pretty much over how it all might affect their profits.  It wasn't until they saw for themselves the House Impeachment Team's case.  

So, in fact, they didn't actually respond much faster themselves.  Otherwise they could have leaned on their bought politicians to vote for conviction.