Putting a businessperson in the White House won't give us a "CEO in Chief"

Wanna hear a joke?

Unemployment is high in America.

How high is it?

It's so high even the dishonest government measurement of unemployment clocks it above 7%. Oh, and yo' mama so fat they count her as two unemployed people.

In a time of high unemployment and flagrant government oafishness like Obamacare, it isn't surprising to hear murmurings about how we "need a businessperson in office." He'll know how to get the economy going! Romney tried leaning on this, and for years Donald Trump had used it to generate publicity.

Businesspeople can't improve the government. Part of the reason businesspeople can achieve things is because they don't have to get votes. Businesspeople only have to provide products. They don't have to whisper sweet nothings in consumers' ears. You can be unlikable and still monumentally successful as long as people like your products. See Steve Jobs.

Politicians have to sugarcoat. They have to whisper sweet nothings. They have to appear likeable. Politicians themselves are the product. That means is they have to lie constantly. The "which candidate would you rather have a beer with" matters big time. In 2008, apart from the media's pornographic love affair with the symbolism of Barack, I think a big part of his prevailing is that every non-lesbian (and probably most lesbians) would rather drink with Barack than Hillary. Barack is probably an interesting enough guy to have a Guinness with. Hillary is lame enough to turn wine into seltzer.

Also, when a CEO promises a new iPhone, he actually has to deliver a new iPhone. He can't not provide one and then just claim he did. He won't have a million propagandizing media subnormals working 'round the clock to convince the nation he provided this nonexistent iPhone. People will notice the lack of a new iPhone and punish him by buying his competitors' phones.

A politician can say he's going to do something like close Gitmo and then simply not do it. Almost nothing ever happens when a politician breaks a promise. People are trained to expect broken promises from politicians (or at least politicians who aren't members of "their" party). CEOs and businesspeople don't have this luxury. If anything, folks are trained to complain vociferously to businesspeople ("the customer is always right"). Therefore, businesspeople have to follow up to some extent on their promises, or else customers and activist shareholders will topple them. See JC Penney.

Once a politician is in office, he is there for at least two years. Unlike a CEO, you're stuck with him. Sometimes you're stuck with him for four or six years, so he can go right on lying for his entire reign, and there is nothing that can be done about it. A businessperson's approval rating results in immediate profits and losses, and he can be put out of business or fired from the CEO position in a matter of months, not years. Parties of all political persuasions are always complaining about voters' short attention spans. They're right. If a guy is in office six years there is plenty of time for each storm to blow over and be forgotten. In business, even a short term storm can topple someone in no time flat. If that businessperson could count on six years of tenure, chances are his sins would be forgotten the way they are for politicians.

CEOs and businesspeople almost never have the advantage of a monopoly. Government by its very definition is a monopoly. There is one DMV. There is one police force. You can only have two Senators in each state. There is no such thing as an upstart third, fourth, or fifth Senator who can suddenly appear and immediately start taking market share. There is no limit to how many different smartphone brands there can be, which is why CEOs and businesspeople must be nimble and responsive to customers if they are to survive. Government, and its mascots in the Congress and White House, is a monopoly, and it acts like one. A politician with the greatest business background still couldn't do anything to change the clumsy, unaccoutable nature of monopolies. The only thing he could do once in office is privatize everything, and forgetting for a moment that that is impossible under our current system, what politician is going to ride in and start diluting his own power by privatizing everything? The last President to use anti-government rhetoric was Reagan, and as we all know he greatly expanded the government.

By believing a businessperson is going to fix government, market-minded people are adopting the same defective mentality as the most anti-business egalitarian: assuming if we could just get the right person in there, things would be better. Wrong. The institution itself isn't fixable. Getting a different mascot to be its face won't render it fixable.

I've heard champions of the marketplace say it is the only real democracy, the only place where you truly have a voice. The reason that is so is because it is democracy without force. Government is nothing but monopoly and force. Government is democracy without the whole "having a voice" part.

Where is John Galt?

The recent Chinese hacking scandal brought to mind a libertarian Zeitgeist that was sweeping the web a few years back.

In '06 and '07, blind faith in emerging market growth and in the assumed superiority of emerging market governments became so contagious that even libertarians caught the bug. I remember reading reports from prominent libertarians who had scoured the Third World in search of Galt Gulches. Their optimistic report: nations like China and Argentina were evolving into safe havens from collapsing Old World powers like the US. Everyone in Asia was a Confucian Steve Jobs. Argentina had learned from the sins of Peron. If I had done a push up each time I saw a sentence giddily comparing "capitalist China" to “anti-capitalist” America, I'd be strong enough to cradle the globe after Atlas shrugged.

Never mind that China still had a command economy. The biggest risk was remaining in the US, and so libertarians who complained about government spawned real estate bubbles in America started fawning over all the government spawned building in China (a place famous for ghost cities). People concerned about US currency debasement talked of seeking refuge in a place that famously suppresses the yuan; treating its citizens to riot-inducing inflation.

Reinforcing the idea of superior freedom and opportunity in the emerging world was the idea of decoupling: The tired West would collapse under the weight of its colossal debt and old ideas, and the vibrant East would suddenly develop a middle class big enough and rich enough to support its continued rise; a rise largely independent of the West. The very people who praised globalism and the opening of more markets were suddenly declaring that the closing (or impoverishment) of Western markets wouldn't matter much. The people who laughed at the idea of Fortress Europe effectively endorsed Fortress Asia.

The key piece in the puzzle of emerging market freedom and prosperity was the Internet. Just as blue jeans supposedly helped topple the Soviet Union, the power of the Internet was going to plant tiny Adam Smith seeds throughout the emerging markets, leading these newly capitalist minds to start utilizing the best aspects of Western thought. Forget V for Vendetta; we were going to have B for Bandwidth.

When the 2008 crisis hit, the emerging world didn't decouple. Most of it collapsed much harder. China didn't look to Adam Smith. They looked to Keynes; launching the largest stimulus in the country's history. And it turns out Argentina didn't reject Peron. Since 2008 Argentina's government has toyed with pension seizures, price controls, nationalization, and capital controls (even going so far as to use currency sniffing dogs to keep evildoers from carrying cash across the border).

It seems these libertarian optimists incorrectly assumed that the merger of a rising emerging world and an exploding Internet was necessarily going to have a libertarian bent. They seemed to think we were poised for a Libertarian Spring. But why should anyone have expected such an outcome? Couldn't Twitter just as readily be used to spread pro-government info.? Couldn't "tax the rich" also go viral? Wasn't uber-statist Barack Obama hoisted into the White House with a huge boost from social media?

Internet tools like Twitter and Facebook are used by people, and most people, wherever they reside, conveniently endorse receiving things paid for by other people. The free market that libertarians rightly celebrate continues to get a lukewarm reception in the marketplace of ideas. Even in the US, anti-libertarian moves likes increasing the minimum wage are condoned by the majority, so it seems predictable that more pro-state ideas are going to be spread online than libertarian ones; just look at Occupy Wall Street and its Internet-generated offspring throughout the world.

To witness this phenomenon at work, visit reddit.com and click on the Politics header. Not a subcategory (subreddit) like “Conservatism” or “Liberal.” Just click plain old Politics. What you will see is a long list of touchy-feely, MORE GOVERNMENT, PLEASE! sentiments dominating the headlines, despite the fact that reddit is outside the system, man!

It is hard not to notice a certain irony in China’s using the Internet—the state’s worst nightmare!--to violate the non-aggression principle. I guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer for the Middle Kingdom to become the Switzerland of the East.

When it comes to popular uprisings--"springs"--, regardless of where they happen or which tools are used to fuel them, it is naïve to presume they will necessarily usher in profound new freedom. Let's not forget what happened at the end of the Prague Spring; the Soviet Union invaded and turned off the spring.

THINK DIFFERENT, but act the same

Since Steve Jobs' death, there has been ample talk about his eccentricities and whether he was a "nice" guy.

Why is anyone surprised when someone who thinks in nontraditional ways behaves in nontraditional ways? He didn't get where he was by thinking like everyone else, so why should anyone expect him to act like everyone else?

Did you seriously expect Jobs to do exactly what everyone else does--overpay to attend an fourth-rate out-of-state college (thus gaining the debt of a brand name education without the brand name education), stay too long with his college sweetheart because he'd heard others say they regretted not marrying their college sweethearts, settle into a stultifying administrative job with a long title and a short salary, work to put enough cash away to qualify for a house he couldn't afford in a neighborhood he didn't like because it's "what you do," then one day just choose to start thinking out of the box? I don't think that's how it works. Rare is the individual who makes 30 years of mouse decisions and then one day wakes up a lion. Deep inspiration isn't a 9-to-5 task accomplished with 9-to-5 methods.

The hero-anointing masses often wish to believe their heroes are just like them. This is part of the reason biographies sometimes trigger such outcry. For instance, many sports fans couldn’t fathom that Michael Jordan, a man who maintained his lust for domination long after he’d become hugely rich and dominant, was a fanatical, pitiless competitor. For Jordan, there was an I in team, the same I that is in M-I-chael. That is part of what it takes to still care about winning after you have accomplished enough feats to last 23 lifetimes. Sorry if that makes you feel dirty about wearing his shoes. Ironically, if MJ lacked that unfaltering need for trophies, you wouldn't want to wear his shoes in the first place.

Also, famed innovators like Mr. Jobs are the folks the masses want to know more about, so it is inevitable that every nook and cranny of their personalities ends up under a microscope. The clerks who work in Apple stores have quirks too, but no one cares enough about them to chronicle their oddities.

None of this is to suggest that Mr. Jobs totally ignored the herds. He needed those herds to believe iPhones were in short supply so that they would rush out to buy them at full price. He then needed the rest of the herd to watch that first herd's antics so that they could rush out to copy them. And so on. Innovators and herds play cat-and-mouse. Or maybe it should be called lion-and-mouse.