Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"The first step may be to finally recognize that “running government like a business” has always been a red herring. The government is not a business — it is the thing that makes business possible. Unregulated markets frequently fail to produce good businesses so long as we define “good” as beneficial to their customers. And unregulated businesses, as we’ve recently been forced to witness, are even worse at producing good government. As the economist Mariana Mazzucato has long argued, the libertarian CEO types now running Washington are willfully ignorant of just how dependent their industries are on the backbone of public services like roads, telecoms, courts and publicly-funded research — services they have enjoyed largely for free since financial liberalization and business tax cuts have allowed them to shelter the vast majority of their profits.</p><p>Step two is much harder: articulating some positive idea of an activist government in the marketplace. For Doctorow, as for many others, this begins with “a very aggressive antitrust agenda” aimed at breaking up the monopolies that have become powerful enough to capture — and try to replace — the federal government under Trump. “You cannot have a referee who is weaker than the players on the field,” he told me.</p><p>“Anti-government nihilism cannot be countered without a defense of the government’s role in daily life.”</p><p>But there are other, more constructive roles the government could play. Doctorow suggested a federal jobs guarantee that would put a meaningful floor on the value of labor. Or a database of publicly funded, patent-free research, which would compel corporations to support interoperability — what Mazzucato has called, in the context of AI, a “decentralized innovation ecosystem that serves the public good.”"</p><p><a href="https://www.noemamag.com/the-good-society-department/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">noemamag.com/the-good-society-</span><span class="invisible">department/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/NewDeal" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NewDeal</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PublicAdministration" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PublicAdministration</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigGovernment" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BigGovernment</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PublicPolicy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PublicPolicy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/PublicInterest" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PublicInterest</span></a></p>