With every presidential election cycle comes discussions of “experience” and “qualification,” most often referring to a candidate’s years of public service.
On the surface, it makes sense.
When you’re looking to fill important roles, you want someone that’s proven they have what it takes to excel – and that kind of expertise is usually something that only comes with years in the field.
Think about the job market. While someone fresh out of college might have great ideas and good intentions, and some of the skills necessary to not just survive but thrive in the C-suite can be taught in a lecture hall, they’re ultimately useless until someone can prove they know how to apply them to the real world, in real time.
So it’s easy to understand why the public might value a presidential nominee that’s spent a third of her life in elected office. It’s easy to understand why some pundits point to her resume and insist that based on the jobs she’s had, she’d be the more competent president of the two options facing the American people.
But when you put the contemporary American government under any real scrutiny, you realize that it doesn’t reward good behavior, good people or good ideas, and it hasn’t in a long time.
San Francisco became worse while she was District Attorney, California became worse while she was Attorney General, and without Trump in office to block everything she championed, the United States would have become worse while she was in the U.S. Senate. Her run for president was a humiliating failure, and still, she’s a heartbeat from the presidency and one stolen election away from the nuclear codes.
And of course, she’s not the only one. Look at Chuck Schumer, look at Nancy Pelosi, look at Mitch McConnell. These fossils have been in office longer than most of my readers have been alive, and throughout careers that long, I’m sure they’ve achieved a few positive things for the American people by sheer statistical chance. But they’ve held onto their influence and enriched themselves by ignoring, betraying, and lying to their citizens.
They’re architects of American decline, and they were able to destroy our country because of their lengthy tenures in public office – not in spite of it.
I’d venture to say that the longer someone has been in government, the more skeptical you should be of them and their motives.
Government jobs attract three types of people: the altruistic, the lazy, and the ambitious.
You get your wide-eyed poli-sci majors that head to Washington or their local city hall straight out of college, convinced they’re going to change the world for the better. You get the classic bureaucrats – the DMV types – that are completely unmotivated and have no desire to be remotely useful, but are happy to collect a government salary while creating as little value as possible for their constituents. And then, you have those people that have believed their destiny was to control others since they participated in Model UN at the age of 14, and have planned accordingly since.
They aren’t mutually exclusive, and if you watch someone’s political career unfold over an extended period of time, you’re likely to see them morph from one type to another.
But in my opinion, the worst and most dangerous of these are without a doubt the latter.
For a long time, people clung to the belief that a career in government meant that a candidate could be trusted. But the truth is, a lot of politicians start their public service early not based on an authentic desire to help others, but a hunger for power that requires meticulous planning and strategy.
They want as much authority as they can get their hands on, and know their most realistic path to obtaining it is embedding themselves in politics as soon as they can, positioning themselves to rise in the ranks and get as close as they possibly can to the crown jewel among self-important sociopaths: the White House. And usually, their longevity isn’t defined by what they actually accomplish on behalf of their residents, but their maneuvering amongst their peers, their loyalty to lobbyists, and their willingness to put their aspirations before the people they’re supposed to represent.
For a long time, we had it backwards.
We believed that career politicians were uniquely capable of leading, and held business owners and enterprisers seeking public office at an arm’s length, when it should’ve been the other way around.
Trump changed that.
On the campaign trail in 2016 working for Ted Cruz, I met person after person that said the same thing. They liked Ted Cruz’s policy, but they loved that Trump wasn’t a politician. They loved that he didn’t have the same hollow buzzwords and empty talking points that they’d been listening to for decades. And at the time, it drove me crazy. But as an adult with a fully developed frontal cortex, I finally understand it.
Entrepreneurs have incentive to improve people’s lives that politicians don’t, because when they aren’t depending on bailouts or legislation that allows them to create artificial monopolies, the more they benefit the consumer, the more they have to gain.
When the government isn’t engineering a company’s prosperity, they need to respond to the needs and wants of everyday people to remain competitive and in the black.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of leverage over our government anymore. They tax us on every interaction, and still spend more than they steal from us on things we don’t want but are reelected again, and again, and again. It’s time to bring back tarring and feathering, but I digress.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not naive about what money can do to people. I’m not under the impression that every entrepreneur is some kind of genius motivated by their love of people or problem solving.
I know a lot of them are greedy, a lot of them are selfish, and a lot of them are cutthroat, ruthless, and godless.
But the same can be said for even more politicians, and a person that spends their life in business usually has to be a lot smarter, tougher and more creative to prevail than a person that spends their life in government. And as voters, our default should be to trust the businessman more than we trust the bureaucrat.
what do you think?