What is the public interest?

A usual, the devil is in the details. Not surprisingly, there is no consensus about what the public interest is. The public interest to one person might mean taxing and regulating the daylights out of businesses. To others, it might mean increasing public employee pensions. From the typical politician's point of view, serving the public interest means getting reelected because they know that they are the best for the public, even when they actually might be the worst. Politicians can be delusional.

Corporate interests

From a corporation's point of view as a legal entity, the public interest is usually, but not always, mostly irrelevant. For corporations, the whole point is maximizing shareholder value, not service to the public. To emphasize that point, it is the case that if a corporation does not act in the best interests of the shareholders, it can be sued by shareholders. Although there usually is some degree of overlap, e.g., many shareholders are members of the public, corporate and public interests do not have to overlap much or at all, except for shareholder benefits. For some for-profit businesses, e.g., many small businesses, there tends to be a lot of public benefit in their activities, including jobs and other economic activity. As with most things political, one needs to be careful about generalizing. There is more much more gray than black and white out there.

From a pragmatic, realistic, non-partisan point of view (my point of view), the public interest is pretty much what it sounds like. It relates to the general well-being of as much of the population, including special interests, as possible. Serving the public interest is a matter of balance between the public and special interests. Helping special interests, particularly for-profit businesses, helps create wealth. Wealth is necessary to support our standard of living. As far as I know, capitalism is the best means for efficiently creating wealth. It isn't perfect, but it does seem to harness the creative side of human nature more effectively than other economic systems.

What is government's role?

Considering the public interest raises the question of what the role of government should be. The proper role of government should be to try to strike the "best" balance between the public and special interests. What we have now is government that is distorted in favor of special interests at the expense of the public. If you disagree, consider California's present dire straits - the messes are obvious. How did we get here? By service to the public interest? Hardly. We got here by political business as usual. That means politicians chasing after "campaign contributions" and serving their own interests first. It also means special interests like businesses and labor unions doing exactly what they are supposed to do, i.e., make or accumulate as much money as possible as fast as possible.

The public interest took it in the shorts and now the chickens have come home to roost. Unfortunately for us, they are very big and nasty chickens.

Want change or not?

A new political party with no particular axe to grind other than to try to find and serve a better balance of interests would constitute something different in politics. If you disagree, you can always stay with the Democrats or Republicans to get more of the same fine quality service that they delivered to get us to where we are today. Their track record is crystal clear and it speaks for itself.