One of Mitt Romney’s countless gaffes during the Republican primary was his assertion that “corporations are people, my friend.” He said it in response to a heckler who implored him to raise taxes on corporations in response to Romney’s assertion that he wouldn’t raise taxes on people. The flap was classic Romney, seeming to illustrate his fundamental differences with the average American. The statement dredged up complicated issues about corporate personhood, but essentially Romney’s statement was true. He meant that while corporations seem like faceless entities, they are comprised of a collective of people. Therefore to raise taxes on a corporation would be akin to raising taxes on the folks whose salaries are paid for by corporate profits.
If corporations are the faceless boogeymen of those on the left, then government plays the same role for those on the right. Republican’s constantly rail against incursions by the government without recognizing that the government is comprised of fellow citizens, many of them elected by a majority of the locales they represent. One key difference is that corporations exist to make profits, while the government theoretically exists to protect people.
Government gets a horrible rap from many folks. Many people’s interactions with the government are negative, they get a parking ticket, they wait on long lines at the DMV, they have to pay taxes, but they don’t recognize all the good things government does on the macro scale. The government built highways, brought electricity to rural populaces, it fights fires, it cleans our streets, it isn’t just some nebulous entity that wants to restrict freedoms.
There have been several scandals in the past couple of weeks that seek to solidify the idea that government officials take advantage of the public trust and live like fat cats off tax dollars. The most controversial is the scandal about several Secret Service members’ peccadillos in Colombia. Apparently the Secret Service operates on a “wheels up, rings off” system, and they commonly run wild while they travel around the world protecting the president. This scandal came to light when a Secret Service member wouldn’t square up with an escort in the morning, the escort then began to reveal a sordid tale of widespread drug use and solicitation of sex workers.
Clearly this is a story that doesn’t reflect well on the Secret Service and House Government Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa has promised to bring down the hammer. An implicit part of the scandal is that Secret Service workers are living hedonistic lifestyles on the taxpayer’s dime. But let’s apply Mitt Romney’s “corporations are people” standard, these Secret Service agents weren’t serving in an official role while they were partying and while the money they used to procure these illicit goods is taxpayer money, it was dispersed to these agents for their service in protecting American interests abroad. Conservatives hate to have the government tell people how to spend their money, unless it’s government workers.
The other scandal is over the General Services Administrations lavish Las Vegas convention. Apparently about a half dozen senior members of the GSA used government money to fund a wild weekend in Vegas for them and their spouses. Again, there’s little to find defensible about the GSA’s actions, but let’s recognize that this isn’t a function of governmental abuse, but rather the actions of some misguided and selfish employees. Conservatives use the reprehensible actions of some to pillory the idea of government. It’s fundamentally cynical, and it’s silly.
Let’s be frank, there are tons of selfish people out there. Whether they choose to butter their bread from ill begotten corporate profits or misappropriated taxpayer dollars, you can’t use the misdeeds of some folks to discredit all the good work these institutions do. Corporations are made up of people and so are governments, we are often flawed, but we’re all we got. We want corporations to innovate, to make money, and we want government to help people. There’s no simple dichotomy, and the discussion could probably be substantively more valuable if we stopped thinking of both as sort of monolithic beings and instead recognized that in some ways we are corporations and we are government(there’s no better illustration of this than Mitt Romney himself).
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