Have government and private enterprise traded places?

Agenda item #1 for my Smart People Council to consider: have the roles of government and private enterprise been reversed?  

As we come out of this COVID-19 pandemic, it's been interesting to see how much effort businesses have been undertaking to tell us what they are doing about employee and consumer safety.  Go on to almost any business website (often necessary because in-store purchasing is not always an option), and they'll have a very important announcement telling us what they are doing.  But it's not just about the pandemic...it's about everything now.  Sports leagues continually tell us about what they are doing about racial justice; restaurants for some time have been trying to speak about how they are good neighbors and working hard to reduce their environmental footprint; and many large companies in recent years talk about how they are 'partnering' with good charities like Habitat for Humanity or soup kitchens.  It's almost as if they recognize that they aren't there just to make money, but do good beyond the bottom line.  

On the other hand, consider how our POTUS has tried to downplay the necessity of government to get involved during the pandemic.  It wasn't his responsibility to be a shipping clerk with masks.  It's not the federal government's responsibility to get generators and track the virus (those are state problems!).  And it's not on his watch that hundreds of thousands have died or government has been very slow to do something about these problems...sure, you can blame Obama (3 1/2 years gone), but then any good news about the economy (which is non-existent now) is all because of him.  

It used to be thought that the role of government was to ensure the greater good for all people; it used to be thought that the role of business and private enterprise was to make money.  Now, it seems, everything has changed.  Businesses are taking on (or at least claiming to) many of those roles that were the domain of the public sector, while governments (or at least this government) are stepping back and saying that such things are not their problem.  Doesn't this seem completely mixed up?  

I'm guessing that the obvious answer is that our Trumpite nutjob federal leadership is mostly to blame for this.  For all his minions' belief that he is out there fighting the 'Deep State', he's just really lazy and can't be bothered to do the job of administering the nation.  Too much twittering and golfing needs to get done.  But I do think that private enterprise has in some ways recognized that it is better to do good, and that perhaps is the long-term plan to be more viable in the eyes of a picky consumer public.  Is their desire truly altruistic?  Certainly not.  But even if their motives are not fully pure, at least they are trying to do something, more so than we can say for the federal government, which at its highest levels has turned into a Trump Support group in recent years.  

Once the current POTUS is gone, hopefully in just a few months, I'm wondering if business will get back to normal, and look at profits again.  Perhaps...but I do think that things have shifted, and businesses perhaps are more representative of the needs of society now than a duly-elected government.  What does this say about democracy and where it is going?  Is this a libertarian dream?  

I really don't know...but hopefully smarter people than me can figure this out.  

The Smart People Council

I am blessed in this life to have a loving wife and kids, and an assortment of good people around me at both church and in my other workplace whom I can trust and turn to in times of trouble for comfort and concern and even a bit of wisdom. 

What I am finding as I get older is that I don't have a lot of truly smart people in my life, people who have a knowledge base in their life that I can visit as comfortably as I google a question.  Years ago when I was in grad school a classmate said that the library needed a guy sitting somewhere in the library to whom you could go and ask any question and get an answer.  I know that it was tongue-in-cheek, of course, but that I idea has always stuck with me, that no matter how many good books I read, and no matter how many people have to give me homespun wisdom to get me through the difficult times, I also need people who are smart enough to consider an idea and tell me whether it is good or just full of crap.  

As I think about the many people who have come in and out of my life, there are some people who simply don't qualify.  

-Those who are Trumpites.  This goes without saying...not that some who might support Trump might not know some things, and their perspective might be one that I need to hear...but these glass-eyed Stepford wife Trumpites have lost my respect.  If they can't see how awful on the whole Trump has been, then they're really just dumb people who I can't trust.

-Nor do I want somebody who has become so woke that they have become insufferable.  Today we have to deal with lots of people who demand that I feel a certain way, that if I don't, and if I'm not as outraged about ____ as much as they are, then I must be a ___ist.  Sorry, I know how I feel, and don't have time with these folks.  

-People who I deal day-in, day-out with.  This seems strange, because surely there are a lot of smart people around me.  But I've learned that up-close personal conflict is not one of my strong suits.  I do get unreasonably upset talking to people who are simply wrong.  I need to control my emotions better, but for now these people don't qualify, not because of them, but because I don't want to break relationship with people close to me.  

That leaves a rather small group of people that I see very rarely...people I went to school with, or whom I have crossed paths with and walked with for a period of my life. Thinking through people with help from my Facebook friends list, I found less than a dozen people who would likely qualify.  These are smart, moderate, sensible people who seem to have some level of success in their life.  Unfortunately, they are a mostly homogeneous group...they come from a similar church tradition as me (even if some have left), they come from similar family and socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, and they likely are all more built up in my head than they actually are.  They're too much like me, perhaps, to really expand my thinking.  

I think about contacting a few of these old friends over Facebook or calling them, and asking them to be my Smart People Council.  But they are busy with families and jobs and lives of their own, and perhaps they would have more pressing subjects that they need to find clarity on to the point that they don't have time to debate my insignificant issue.  I need to make more friends where I am, to listen better to the people around me, and perhaps not think that I'm smarter than the nincompoops I look down upon.  Maybe the first lesson my SPC would do is disband, to tell me as their leader to get a better life, I don't know.  But still I imagine, someday when I am world dictator, these people will get my summons.