The fundamental question this election has been what kind of change do we want. It is difficult to dissect what each candidate means by change, so let’s start with some high level conversation about where we should be headed. The stereotype is that Republicans support small government and big business while Democrats support big government and oppose big business (granted these are huge stereotypes that do not hold for everyone and recent actions by both parties suggest their respect leaders like big government and big business). There are a couple of fundamental laws at work when it comes to big business and big government. One is an organizational law and the other is a law of power. To simply say we support big business and not big government or vice versa is to ignore these fundamental laws.

The first issue is determining the fundamental difference between big government and big business. Yes, big business seeks profit and big government is seeks the will of the people, but the reality is there is no meaningful difference. Big business and big government both have a hierarchical organization structures, and individuals employed by governments and businesses will seek out their own interest before that of the organization. These two facts have a much greater influence over behavior then profit seeking versus tax seeking. In fact there is no real difference between a big business seeking higher profits and government seeking higher tax revenue. Both actions are in the self interest of the individuals running the organizations.

As organizations get larger they become more bureaucratic, in other words policies and procedures play an increasingly larger role the bigger the organization becomes. These increasing policies and procedures have two impacts. First, they are designed to maintain the status quo and minimize innovation. Second, they are designed to protect the employees (of either government or business) from having to deal with real customer problems. Customers of big business and big government are disempowered from having any influence on the organization without exerting tremendous time and energy that makes most people unwilling to try. In large measure, most employees are also disempowered from having any influence on the company as well.

The second law relates to power. The larger an organization becomes the more power it will want to accumulate in order to maintain their position. The accumulation of resources (both people and money) is the most obvious form of the accumulation of power. Big business and big government now have substantially more power then every before, because the amount of financial and people resources they have are higher than they have ever had before. We are naïve if we think that business or government will then not use their financial resources to maintain their position. The fact is the U.S. government has more money and power than any organization on earth, and no matter who is in charge of it they will work to accumulate more power. Many like to blame Bush for the current position, but the reality is it would not matter if it were Gore or Kerry, we would be in much the same position we are today (yes, we can debate whether we would be in Iraq and other seemingly big issues, but fundamentally on the things that really matter there would be little difference).

So given the laws of hierarchy and power, where do we go from here. Society has gotten very complex and the issues we are dealing with require new ways to think about them. These problems will not be solved by big government and big business, as their primary function is to maintain the status quo. Changes will have to come at the local level, by local people, and local organizations. If we want change, then we need to empower local organizations and people to solve them. These organizations do not have the same level of hierarchy and therefore are easier to manage and promote innovation. The second thing is that power needs to be redistributed back to the people. Obama likes to talk about redistributing wealth (although Bush and McCain are not far behind), but fundamentally it is about power. The fact that individuals have millions of dollars is irrelevant compared to business and government having billions of dollars at their disposal. The federal government needs to push responsibility back to the states, and states need to push it back to local governments, and the tax dollars need to follow. Moving money from big business to big government, or vice versus, does nothing to change the power structure; nor does moving money from rich individuals to poor ones. These are simply shell games to divert attention away from the real problems.

From a big business standpoint, we need to sanity check the bigger is better mentality and only have large companies in those industries that really make sense. Banks, insurance, health care, agriculture, media and many other core necessities do not require big business to be efficient, in fact they are more inefficient, which is why many of them need subsidies to survive. The number of multinational companies should be a very short list and tightly regulated, while the number of local, private own businesses needs to substantially increase with greater access to financial resources.

For those out there hoping for change, you will get to wait a while longer, it will not matter who gets elected next Tuesday. The state and federal government and multinational companies will keep getting larger and accumulating more power along the way. The real solutions to problems like health care, education and poverty will remain undiscovered by the federal government and big business, not interested in innovation and change. Eventually people will start to realize what the fundamental issues are, and then from the bottom up we can promote change; but it will occur much faster when both political ideologies realize their respective errors in their assumptions and work together to redistribute power.