Government is not a business
“Time to run the government as a business, not a charity,” an X user posted this week.
The account was pro-Trump, defending the administration’s unprecedented meddling in private enterprise. As the Cato Institute and others have documented, the administration has taken sizable ownership stakes in private companies, alarming those who believe these parts of the economy are best left to private firms.
The irony is hard to miss: many who decry regulation as socialism seem perfectly comfortable with the government buying up shares of American companies.
But what struck me wasn’t the usual defense of a troubled and unpopular president. It was the view of government underneath it.
To that user, a government run like a business maximizes profit, cuts costs, and courts paying customers. A government run like a charity hands out favors and coddles the masses when it should be a tough, honest CEO.
That view runs counter to the principles this nation was founded on. Virginia’s 1776 Declaration of Rights held that “government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit.”
Maryland declared the same year that all government “originates from the people” and is “instituted solely for the good of the whole.”
Massachusetts, in 1780, put it best: Government exists “to secure the existence of the body politic, to protect it, and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying in safety and tranquility their natural rights, and the blessings of life.”
Shaped by Whig and Enlightenment thought, the founders did not place government on a throne for its own benefit. They placed it within reach of its citizens, for theirs.
More than a century later, Woodrow Wilson warned that this ideal had been corrupted. In his 1913 inaugural address, he lamented that government had “too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes,” and that those who used it “had forgotten the people.” His remedy was not sentiment but principle: “The firm basis of government is justice, not pity.”
The Declaration of Independence says it simply: Government exists to secure our unalienable rights, in the form that “shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” A government that serves only itself is no government at all. It is precisely the kind the people have the right to alter or abolish.
So if we must choose a metaphor, government is closer to a charity than a business. Not out of pity, as Wilson said, but out of justice: it treats the people’s wellbeing as its first object because that is what it was instituted to do. It either serves the people, or the people serve it. That is the American view.
In 2026, as in 1776, the answer to our challenges is not a turn toward soulless Leviathan but a return to first principles: a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The moment our government puts profits before people and power before principle is the moment we must remind it that it was made to be a servant, not a corporation.
Cicero said it two thousand years ago: Salus populi suprema lex esto. Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.