Big government is surficially perceived as a sort of Robin Hood that taxes the rich to pay for entitlements for the poor and shiftless. Big business is an entitlement unto itself in virtue of its entrepreneurism and subsequent capital growth. The former answers to its constituency, the latter to its investors. Each therefore is presumed to exercise responsible management.

In practice, however, each walls in this responsibility and tends to focus on the trees and is blind to the forest, which is the commonwealth. Both of these great bodies are enveloped by the symbiosis of interests that further their existence. Big government concerns itself with the art of vote-getting while big business is absorbed in productivity that generates the greatest value for investors.

The ideal is that both should be in partnership actuating the formation of the larger scenario of what is good for the nation as a whole. Welfare entitlement, for instance, should not be treated lightly and become institutionalized for its own sake. Welfare should be an entity of needs, not wants. It is also testimony that there is insufficient productivity within the walls of business to open up opportunity for those without. In partnership, the government would give notice to the business realm that it must more wisely utilize its capital and knowledge to further the commonwealth at the expense of its tendency to be exclusive. Business should extend the practice of inclusive consumerism by continually increasing the market for all. It is, in a way, the old Henry Ford concept to increase its payroll to the extent that his employees will also buy the product they help build.

Big government should concede that to end welfare, except for truly legitimate cases, only the business realm can do that when it is motivated to endorse social responsibility. Heretofore the productive realm chooses to heap responsibility onto the broad shoulders of big government, yet is critical of government spending. Government needs to jawbone the money-makers to create necessary projects that would make workers proud to be a part of meaningful nation-building, not unlike the aesthetic and utilitarian projects of the Renaissance and ancient Greece.

There is much to be done and the capital world should accept the responsibility to further the common good by ending its frivolous ventures — tallest buildings, casinos, stadia, luxury housing — and focus on the making of a beautiful society — green belt accommodation for low cost housing, mono-rails, gorgeous schools, state of the arts museums, hospitals, aesthetic, affordable hotels, and massive reconstruction of blighted areas — in order to extend inclusion for a better life.

In return big government would earmark proportionately from its human services budget to subsidize participating businesses. Moreover, its Medicare bureaucracy would garner its purchasing power in behalf of companies’ health insurance costs, together with the spin-off industries these projects would generate. Without this partnership, divisiveness among the haves and have-nots will continue to plague a nation in atrophy.

Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: July, 22, 2004.