Yeah, there's a pretty big difference between making an investment and hoping for a return... and spending more than 2x what you make every year for decades with no sign of slowing down.
But you're right, if you look at it like a business, overspending just makes sense. That's the fundamental problem with a candidate like Romney, even if you look at the "optimal Romney" (the Romney whose set of opinions is the collection of the best opinions he has had over the entirety of his political carreer) -- he wants to treat government like a business. The trick is that businesses are out to profit, while the government isn't.
Really, the government is a machine. There's a reason most of the founding fathers were engineers -- they were building a system, and a system needs to be engineered. I guess the big difference is a business can have a wide range of success, from breaking even to doing really well, while the best a machine can do is work correctly. There can be glitches that make it perform worse or not at all, but the most anyone wants is for it to work. That's a much better model for government, and the critical insight that it provides is that, like any engineered system, every benefit comes with a downside, and like any solution to an engineering problem, the simplest answer is the best. Occam's Razor, right? And what could be simpler than "read the Constitution"?
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_foolmo_
'Most people at least try to say something funny. See foolmo's post as an example.' - The Real Truth