MBA President?

Mitt Romney is the second person in modern time with a Masters in Business Administration degree who wanted to become President of The United States.  Both candidates claimed that their business experience and education better prepared them for the job and were assets to aid in competently doing the job.  They both cited a lack of business experience or business education as deficiencies in their opponents’ resumes.  One has to ask why we should believe that claim.  Business is not government and government is not business.  The MBA focuses on maximizing profits but government is not a profit making venture.  The MBA teaches the way to maximize profit is to minimize expenses which may work when the job is producing a product but government does not produce a product.  Government provides services.  Government provides security.  While cost/value measurements may apply to the provision of services to some extent, this measurement cannot be used in the application of government as it is used in business.  The results of the last MBA president should be more than a sufficient example that the business approach does not work very well when applied to government.   Lowering prices may produce increased sales in business but, as we have seen, lowering taxes does not produce greater government revenues.   No one at IBM, Microsoft, or Apple would claim that inequality was a bad thing for business.  However, read the book by Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, and see how this has impacted government, and more important, the governed.  Finally, while Romney may have managed to be successful, in part, by shipping jobs to countries with lower wages and even shipped call center jobs offshore when Governor of Massachusetts, off-shoring or out-sourcing is not the solution to rebuild the American economy.  MBA for President ... been there ... did that ... have the foreclosure notices to prove it ... and the country will be paying the price for many years to come thanks to the last MBA President.