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by awinder 2646 days ago
> like treating customers well

This has come up with the current president's most-dimwitted son and it's so hysterical it bears repeating. US taxpayers and voters are not the customer. They're the board.

3 comments

Don't take this as a tacit defense of whichever son it was by any means, but: There are plenty of situations where the interaction between the government <-> constituents is very much like a business <-> customer relationship, and it's not totally insane to think that it could be a better/friendlier/more efficient one.

Example: Interactions with TSA, IRS, DMVs (state government obviously but a government nonetheless), etc.

I get what you're saying, but I think you also have to understand what Andrew Yang is implying (not particularly interested in looking up the quote from whichever son).

> This has come up with the current president's most-dimwitted son and it's so hysterical it bears repeating. US taxpayers and voters are not the customer. They're the board.

A closer analogy would be that the US government is a non-exclusive consumer coop, and the citizens are the customer-owners, non-citizen residents, visitors, and other tax-or-fee payers a lotre non-owner customers, and Congress is the board.

>US taxpayers and voters are not the customer. They're the board.

I think you mean the shareholders. Who elect the board (Congress). And vote for the CEO (President) who is accountable to the board and shareholders.