[mindslight]

OP did not imply that someone making 5M/year was not better at capital allocation than the government, but rather just implied a different measure of "better".

For example, there is a good chance that said individual would invest the money in more regulatory-capture extraction schemes. In this case, we would be better off if those resources were just straight-up wasted by the government proper.

Of course there's also a good chance that the government would use it to fund their own citizen-hostile totalitarianism (eg the NSA). The point is that the general heuristic of government inefficiency is inapplicable.