Overview

The Business of Government: When the State Acts Commercially Government does not merely govern. It borrows. It guarantees. It contracts. It securitizes. It monetizes. It delegates. It enforces through instruments that look less like statutes and more like structured finance. The modern state is not only sovereign. It is an enterprise. The Business of Government dismantles the illusion that public power operates solely through legislation and regulation. Instead, it reveals the commercial machinery beneath contemporary governance: bond covenants that bind future legislatures, concession agreements that outlast elections, guarantee programs that quietly socialize risk, fee systems that replace taxation, and administrative enforcement models that resemble debt collection more than adjudication. When the state enters markets, it does not step outside the Constitution-it reorganizes its power through contracts and credit. And when it does, the rules change. Obligations become enforceable. Liabilities become measurable. Risk is priced, distributed, and sometimes hidden. This book exposes that architecture. From sovereign immunity and the Tucker Act to municipal bankruptcy, public-private partnerships, federal credit programs, and the market participant doctrine, this work examines how enterprise logic reshapes public authority. It confronts the structural tension between democratic flexibility and long-term financial commitments. It asks whether governments can bind themselves contractually without binding the future electorate. It identifies the point where financial discipline strengthens governance-and where it begins to constrain it. This is not commentary. It is structural analysis. For legal scholars, policymakers, financial professionals, and citizens who sense that something fundamental has shifted in how government operates, The Business of Government provides a clear-eyed examination of a state that now functions as both sovereign and market actor. The question is no longer whether government regulates the economy. The question is what happens when government becomes part of it.

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