Jennifer Granholm is not the subject matter of this article, but she is one among many poster children for its message. So who is Jennifer Granholm? For eight years, Jennifer Granholm was the governor of Michigan. During her tenure, Michigan lost 576,000 jobs and led the nation in unemployment for 45 consecutive months.. Her efforts to improve the conditions of the people of her state included presiding over annual deficits of $1.5 billion and her support of tax hikes. By all objective measures, her efforts were an abysmal failure.
By John Bernardi
In the real world, which is to say the private sector, we read stories every day about successful people who tell us their road to success began with failure, often repeated failures. With grit and determination and a belief in themselves, they persevered through personal and family hardship until at some point finding the combination to success. These people report that learning from their mistakes was critical to their progress.
So what about Jennifer Granholm? What has she learned from her experience as governor of Michigan? The University of California, Berkeley, her alma mater, has announced that Ms. Granholm will be joining the faculty of that prestigious university and will this semester be leading a seminar on “creating jobs through better government policies for innovation and education.” This brings us to the point of this article.
In the private sector, failure is met with devastating consequences. The strong struggle to adapt and survive; the weak give up and are channeled to the ash heap. Fairness is not the issue. Only children are indulged such inquiry. Life is that way, and so is success, or so it is in the real world.
Then there is the world of government. In government, as in the private sector, there is a struggle to the top, but in government there is a different skill set. It is not what you know but whom you know. It is about going along to get along. It is about doing your time and waiting in line. Every word must be carefully measured least you fall out of favor with the powers that be and with the social media. Your personal beliefs must give way to those who hold the key to your future. Merit in government is defined by loyalty, not achievement. Here also, fairness is not the issue. Failure, however, does not carry with it the same consequences as it does in the private sector.
Let us return to Jennifer Granholm as an example of the government mentality. Ms. Granholm had a sincere belief that government was the way to helping the people of Michigan. Based on her belief, she had an idea that if she took more money in the form of taxes from the people of her state and spent money the state didn’t have, somehow this would lead to more jobs, less unemployment, more people wanting to come into the state, and ultimately a better financial environment to address the state’s budget deficits.
Those old-timers among us are often accused of not being open to new ideas, and that may very well be true. But Jennifer’s belief and her ideas are not new. The government solution has been tried over and over again, in California, in Illinois, in Detroit, in Chicago, in New York, in numerous other cities and states, and in the United States Congress with the same result, yes the very same result: lost employment, increased poverty, government corruption, high crime and lost population. What is it about the mindset of the government mentality that fails to understand the need for change, for a new idea, for the realization that what is not working has never worked—here, there, or anywhere?
The problem is that government is an organism much like any organism. Once given birth, it struggles to survive, never ceding power, always seeking control, growing, growing, growing, always at the expense of personal freedom. Failure is not the measure of achievement but the loss of power and the loss of control over the individual.
Whereas achievement merits respect in the private sector, titles and credentials carry the day in government as well as academia where the exchange between the two is ongoing. So, at California Berekley, Jennifer Granholm will be teaching her students how government is the light and the way for innovation and education. According to the title of her seminar, her emphasis will be on “better” government policies as the solution to our Country’s many social and financial problems. A cynic would say there is no one better qualified to speak on the subject.
At California Berkley and at other bastions of academic hubris, Ms. Granholm will carry in her title and be referred to as the former governor of Michigan, and that kernel of truth will obscure what Paul Harvey always referred to as “the rest of the story.”