We often hear that government should be run like a business. Let’s ponder for a moment if other things in life were run like the government.

A football team for instance would have to always speak nicely about their opponents. The coach couldn’t yell at or punish bad players. Injured players would be so costly and time consuming that the team would have to forfeit games. Labor laws would cause some teams to have to play with eight or nine players while other teams had 11 players.

The winning team would have to give half their earned points to the losing team, who keeps all their earned points.

Therefore a team who loses 50 to 10 would actually win 35 to 25. Then we would all start watching overseas football while the coaching staff blames each other for sending fans overseas.

A business, for instance, would take pay from the best employees and give to the less productive employees. We would provide excellent pay and benefits we can’t possibly afford and let the employees vote out the managers who try to fix problems. They could also vote out managers who were best qualified and put in managers with no experience but who offered them big raises we also can’t possibly afford.

We would give everyone huge, sweet pensions even if they only worked two years and their decisions destroyed the business.

We would let anyone who walks through our doors become employees without even filling out applications, taking drug test, credit checks or police reports and immediately shower them with all the great pay and benefits we still can’t afford.

We would print money to pay the payroll on the copy machine and it would have no value.

A religion, for instance, would have to fight the devil without being allowed to say the word devil while being sued by the ACLU at every turn for mistreating the devil.

We would have to let the devil join the church and make laws that allow him to perform devilish acts while he is in church and not conform to the laws of the church which have been followed for 200 years.

If we told the church deacons to search all people who have a red suit, pitchfork, red horns and a red tail, we would be sued for racial profiling. So, instead, we search long term members of the church at random to make sure they are not really the devil.

A family, for instance, would let the kids vote on things like if they want candy for breakfast, drive a car, drink beer, do drugs or vote out the parents when they don’t get their way.

The kids get to make all the financial decisions for the family so the parents promise them everything they want just to get voted back in as parents.

We can all see and understand the problems these things would cause yet we allow our government to continue to run like this every day. Ignoring the circumstances and voting yourself or others unearned money out of the public treasury is the biggest threat to democracy and our current debt level can’t afford any more of this.

Get educated. Get involved and strive to become an educated voter.

Joe Freeman

Crown City