From the rich catalogue of conservative fetishes the Trump administration has plucked a reliable old chestnut: The notion that government should be run like a business. The bulging portfolio of presidential son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, in fact, includes the Office of American Innovation, whose operating principle, Kushner has said, is that “the government should be run like a great American company."

Just one problem: No great American company would hire a CEO who knows as little about an industry as Donald Trump knows about government.

Competent governance, after all, is a meta-discipline that involves at least a passing acquaintance with economics, political science, history and foreign affairs, just to get the list started. These aren’t exactly the strong suits of a mind that is not, as the Car Talk guys used to say, “overly burdened by the thought process,” but is apparently moved by the last thing it heard on FOX News.

Trump, in fact, exemplifies precisely the opposite of contemplative public service. He is a familiar, tiresome, reactionary American type – let me coin a category here, the crustacean conservative – who not only knows nothing but has open contempt for people who do know things. Slate editor Jacob Weisberg once described George W. Bush as not just ignorant but “aggressively ignorant.” Trump might be lethally ignorant. If we’re not going to use nuclear weapons, he once argued, “Why do we make them?”

Trump’s analog in the automotive industry would be a CEO who knows zero about producing cars, is dismissive of people who do make them (those haughty “experts”), and hires immediate family members to run the enterprise, never mind that their primary experience is in fashion and real estate.

But let’s put all that aside and do a little thought experiment regarding how government-as-business might actually work at, say, a profit-maximizing Defense Department. Right off the bat, the Defense Secretary becomes CEO and the Joint Chiefs the C-level suite, answerable to the Gods of Shareholder Value. First things first: market-test a new name. Lock-N-Load, “America’s Sentinel,” has a nice ring.

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Meanwhile, those 1.3 million active-duty personnel are no longer servicemen and -women; from now on they’re valued team members leveraging their core competencies with robust, holistic, client-driven quality-transformation tools to deliver excellent customer service.

Alas, some divisions will need right-sizing, and those Navy SEALS aren’t particularly earnings-accretive. Just blue-skying here, but what say we outsource some of these functions to the eager laborers of Bangalore and Guangzhou?

And isn’t there some way we can unlock the intrinsic value of those aircraft carriers and F-16s? I’m seeing strategic synergies with Royal Caribbean and Virgin Galactic.

I’ll stop before the OAI starts getting ideas.

Yes, government-as-business is a childish idea, but it’s not far from what Republicans have actually proposed in flights of free-market fantasy calculated to fire up the contributor base. Let us recall former Minnesota Governor and onetime presidential aspirant Tim Pawlenty, whose “Google test” posited that “if you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn't need to be doing it." Since one can Google private defense firms, there’s one more reason for a Pentagon IPO.

Donald Trump, like all hucksters, has mastered the art of facile sloganeering. But let’s not confuse Trumpian impulsivity with serious policy or be tempted to surrender public administration to the craven, bottom-line species that, in Oscar Wilde’s exquisite phrase, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Democratic governance is supposed to be about the consensual accommodation of conflicting interests and fundamentally differing views, not price discovery and returns on equity. Some things – like vaporizing terrorists and caring for the medically uninsurable – we want done with the selfless thoroughness of a Navy SEAL, not the low-bid efficiency of a real-estate celebrity.

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