Why Policy Makers Should Act More Like Business People
I am firmly of the mindset that government functions better when it acts more like private enterprise. That is, lean, efficient, and effective.
It was this mindset that led me to an odd realization; Recent tariff policies set by the Trump administration remind me of a common rookie mistake made by enterprise startups.
The mistake occurs when one of your first, most important customers asks you to build out a specific feature that doesn’t actually make sense and is a lot of work but you do it anyway because you’re afraid of losing them, even though the feature doesn’t address the root of the pain point they think it will and the investment of resources destroys your runway.
Most farmers’ big pain point is, they wish to be more competitive in a global market so they can increase profits. Many probably supported the idea of tariffs because they didn’t anticipate the retaliatory actions tariffs are now causing, making their products less competitive in the global marketplace.
Addressing their actual pain point would look like focusing on taxes and regulation to create a more favorable business environment, promoting free trade norms, building more infrastructure for more efficient and low-cost shipping of goods, and investing in higher education, specifically to land-grant universities like the University of Nebraska-Lincoln which helps farmers find scientifically-proven ways to increase yields and deal with the effects of climate change.
Notice how none of those suggestions included tariffs, because tariffs hurt farmers. That’s why one of the most pro-farming presidents in United States history, Thomas Jefferson, was so against them. They’ve always been a bad idea for agriculture.
Lawmakers are the engineers and designers of public policy. They should treat their job as such a craft. Just as enterprise customers are not software engineers so they sometimes ask for things that don’t make sense in the long-run, voters are not trained policy engineers so they sometimes ask for things that don’t make sense in the long-run.
That’s why I say voting blocs are the enterprise customers of public policy. It’s high-stakes. You need them to build a base so it’s tempting to do everything they say exactly as they say it to keep them in the short-run, even if it means losing them in the long-run.
That’s what President Trump is doing. His intentions on this issue are actually fairly pure and positive, deliver on campaign promises in the most literal sense. I don’t want to dissuade politicians from adopting the value set of delivering on campaign promises.
But one must also think critically about the effects of their policies; Successful policy makers are much like successful business people.
They listen to the end result their customers (constituents) want in order to find the most efficient ways to deliver on those pain points. If you actually deliver on solving voters’ pain points, they will turn out loyally, whether or not the solution is the exact one they were capable of conceptualizing beforehand.
If you exacerbate their pain points, they will not vote for you in the future, whether or not the cause is something they specifically asked for.
