How Republican “Policy” is Pushing Our Nation into Decline and Our Species Toward Self-Extinction

“The business of America is business.” — Calvin Coolidge

I want to “to reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” — Grover Norquist

1. The basics. Let’s start with some basics. How has our human species managed to dominate every other living species on our planet? Individually, the strongest of us is no match for a lion, tiger, gorilla, orca, whale or even a shark. Most of us would have a tough time surviving a death match with a bobcat, which adults outweigh.

So how did we become the dominant species on our planet? We did it by communicating and cooperating—working together—better, more often, with more detail and more nuance than any other species, including ants and termites.

We are weak individually but strong collectively. Our working together made our species’ success. And that ability now has brought us to the point of having the power to destroy our planet, or at least its biosphere, with pollution, runaway global warming, or nuclear winter.

2. How do we cooperate? So how do we perform this miracle of cooperation that has led our species to planetary domination and also to the brink of self-destruction? There are many ways, but the most obvious and important are in families, teams, schools, businesses and nations.

Each of these methods is important. The reason team sports are such a big part of our life (although they don’t contribute directly to our survival) is that they’re a training ground and testing lab for the rest. They test and demonstrate, in “play” on a personal level and with non-lethal competition, the skill of cooperation (teamwork!) that has made our species supreme.

Today, the two most important aspects of human cooperation are businesses and nations. Together, they have brought us to the apex and the nadir of our collective existence. On the upside, they have led to the miracles of modern air travel, agriculture and medicine, joint transplants for seniors and vaccines, drugs and technology to prevent or cure a vast array of diseases. On the downside, they have led to the ravages of smoking, chronic improper nutrition for vast swathes of our population, those plastic spoons in our brains, and unnecessary, destructive wars too numerous to count.

For the last century and change, we humans have engaged in a curious and dogmatic dialogue about business and government, which has helped spur some of the worst wars in our species’ history. The language we use is various: capitalism versus socialism (or Communism), individual versus collective, “freedom” versus government “tyranny,” etc.

More recently, this ongoing dialogue has boiled down to two questions. First, are human societies better off if their cooperative units are organized as businesses run for profit, or if they are governments or non-profit institutions like the Catholic Church and other charities? Second, in either case, how are the cooperative units (whether businesses or governments) controlled or run? Are they “democracies” in some form, run by elected leaders, or are they monarchies or despotisms run by one or more owners or tyrants.

The “political” expression of these questions is often reduced to absurd exaggeration and oversimplification, likening all strong-government societies to Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba or Hitler’s Nazi Germany. At the same time, so-called “analysis” often ignores the facts that some businesses (such as sole proprietorships) are run like monarchies or dictatorships, while most larger businesses today are corporations that are to some extent democratic, with shareholders electing a board of directors who in turn select and govern management. In fact, today the most important difference between business and government is not the means of organizing (something like democracy or something like despotism) but the primary goal, whether the profit of a few (the owners) or the welfare and survival of a people, a nation or our entire species.

3. Which form of “governance” prevails, and when? It should be obvious by now that business and government differ not so much in form (there are democracies and despotisms in each category) but in purpose. The purpose of business is to make money for its owners, whether a sole proprietor or widely diverse public shareholders. The purpose of government is to serve the welfare and protect the safety of everyone in the society, regardless of wealth or ownership, and (by regulation) to keep business—whether inadvertently or deliberately for profit—from harming the collective.

I have written a whole essay discussing why business is usually better at producing and distributing goods and services efficiently and (sometimes, but by no means always) at scientific, engineering and medical research—at least when the research has a near-enough probable horizon for success to justify adequate private investment. The reasons revolve around the benefits of specialization and concentration and the strong motivation that private profit creates. But basic research, to advance human knowledge with no immediate or visible practical and profitable application, is still the province of government and nonprofit institutions. And under our current administration, it’s pretty much on the ropes.

4. The best “solution.” Clever readers will notice that the headings of this and the previous section contain an implicit assumption. They imply that one of government or business must prevail, if not in general, at least in most cases. They imply that the preference for business or government is either/or, rather than situational—that human progress requires a death struggle between the two.

Of course that implication is nonsense. It’s illogical on its face, a non-sequitur, impractical, and contrary to historical experience. How can business, which by definition is designed to increase the wealth of its owners, invariably promote the welfare of society in general?

We know that’s not necessarily the case. And we have spectacular examples to the contrary. The tobacco industry made huge profits (and still does) at the cost of debility and predictable disease for millions of users of its products. The fossil-fuel industries, while powering industry and transport, have caused untold human misery and disease, from the “London Fogs” (really, coal smogs) of the nineteenth century, through the cancer-causing air pollution in many (mostly minority) neighborhoods today, to the ever-present plastic microparticles and increasingly self-evident and rapidly accelerating planetary heating of today. And this is just to mention the worst offenders, not the “little” ones like thalidomide, pre-seat-belt cars, and asbestos in private homes and businesses. Eventually, it took government regulation to curtail the human suffering from these for-profit excesses.

5. Conclusions. It’s just common sense that, because business is focused on private profit as its primary goal, it will not always have the public welfare foremost in mind. Sometimes (probably most times) the harm that businesses do will be inadvertent, if negligent. Sometimes, as in the case of the tobacco industry’s persistent exploitation of personal addiction to nicotine, it will continue long enough for inadvertence and even negligence to look like deliberate harm.

But whatever the level of bosses’ culpability, the basic conclusion is sound: organizations designed for the purpose of producing private profit cannot be relied on to promote the welfare of the entire population, especially when those goals conflict in practice.

Thus, however “efficient” and “effective” business might be, humanity in general must control it through governments to avoid such things as the devastation of widespread smoking, the thalidomide crisis, those plastic spoons in our brains, the pollution of the Earth’s biosphere (down to the Mariana Trench) with plastic microparticles, the devastating global acceleration of planetary heating (which has just produced the hottest summer on record worldwide and threatens an even worse future), and the overreliance on fossil fuels for energy, whose improvidence the effects of the ever-widening Mideast war now under way demonstrate beyond question. And the more complex and sophisticated business becomes, the more complex and sophisticated government must become, if only to keep business honest and insure that it serves the people’s general interests as well as the profit motives of its owners.

Enter today’s Republicans. Two generations ago, Ronald Reagan declared that your taxes are “your money!” Ever since, the Republican Party has sought to exploit the understandable and entirely human resentment at paying taxes to empower business and disempower government, principally by cutting taxes and starving government.

The so-called “Grand Old Party” or GOP has not limited this principle to excesses of government or its rules. Instead, it has made downsizing, disempowering and starving government a general crusade, best exemplified by Grover Norquist’s infamous quote above.

So now our species is facing three existential crises, all caused, promoted or heedlessly let rip by private business. The first is the acceleration of planetary heating toward a new, much hotter “steady state” climate in which near-equatorial sections of our globe are likely to become uninhabitable except when artificially cooled (requiring yet more energy!) or maintained underground. The second is the as-yet-unknown health effects of all those plastic microparticles in our brains, bodies, food, homes, clothing and environment.

And the third—often discussed today but with no regulation or other supervision in sight—is the impact of a now-pending massive, imprudent rollout of AI on employment, war-making and the possible autonomous launching of weapons, including nukes. We are just now beginning to suffer the effects of AI erasing “white collar” jobs at a pace and in numbers vastly larger than the loss of weavers’ jobs to automated looms that once provoked the hopeless but destructive “Luddite” movement in early nineteenth-century England.

For all these things, the GOP’s response, in effect, is “Let ‘er rip! Business knows best, and government just gets in the way!”

If you agree, by all means vote Republican in the upcoming midterm election. But if you have doubts that the likes of Sam Altman (Open AI’s CEO) or Elon Musk have your and the nation’s (let alone humanity’s!) best interests at heart, you have only one rational course of action.

Vote for every Democrat on the ballot, without regard to their funny names, non-majority religions or national origins, and most definitely without regard to Fox’ and Sinclair’s claims that they are extremists or Communists out to destroy capitalism. (The mere frequency and ease of such claims ought to convince you that most or all are fictitious.)

For if Fox’ and Sinclair’s propaganda wins again, Sam, Elon (with his chain saw) and the tech bros with their unleashed AI are likely to destroy your job, your future, your family and your country, and possibly even our species, not to mention neglecting all the real science and engineering that led to our present relatively happy lives.

So there is really only one overweening issue in this election: whether the unsupervised businesses that have produced the most corrupt executive administration in American history, that have created a software- and finance-focused business culture, neglecting the hard science and engineering that made our nation great, that have brought us the tobacco plague, planetary heating, and plastic microparticles in your brain and throughout the Earth’s biosphere, and that now threaten your job and the very structure of our society with AI, will at last be subject to adult supervision.

Heedless self-interest is not a policy; it’s license! And selfishness is not a plan; it’s a vice! Please vote accordingly, and don’t listen to the ad-hominem attacks and the name calling. Just look at whether a candidate supports a government that nudges business toward honest nation-building, or whether he/she is out to let business bosses driven by greed run free.

That’s the only issue that matters in this critical moment in our nation’s and our species’ history. It’s the most important by far, for it will determine whether we can pull ourselves together or whether our nation will continue its already astonishingly rapid decline.