[typomatic]

Are you serious? There's a better way to work together to take risks and tackle problems that are too big for individuals, and it's called "government": the original corporation that won't sell your grandmother to a meat company for a quarter.

[exolymph]

Governments screw over their citizens all the time, on every scale. And their abuses are backed up by violence.

[guscost]

Ah government, the "original corporation" that occasionally decides your grandmother is a problem, organizes a pogrom, and shoots her.

[TangoTrotFox]

And if you should want to pursue something on a large scale that is not currently trending in government or social circles?

Space is maybe the clearest example of the problem with governments doing anything outside of creating a playground for innovation. 1969 was probably the greatest single government led achievement. We put a man on the moon, having only first put a man into orbit in 1962 and any object into orbit in 1958. That was when space had the government's full attention both as a possible means of weaponization and as a soft power victory of communist powers [ironically] aiming to show the resolve and capability of capitalist nations.

But that same story also shows the downsides of government dependence. Today, nearing the 50th anniversary of putting a man on the moon - we're severely struggling to try to send a man around the moon. And in fact no human would ever leave low Earth orbit after 1972. We not only stopped progressing technologically, we actually and literally technologically regressed. On top of this regression, government never has much of any motivation to cut costs or improve efficiency since they're short term public 'servants' who are just spending other peoples' money. Because of this costs became insane. After all was said and done the Space Shuttle program ended up costing more than half a billion dollars per launch.

At the risk of being tautological, corporations let people pursue what people want to pursue. Governments, by contrast, pursue what governments want to pursue. If you don't like what the government's pursuing you can try to influence votes, lobby, or 'raise social awareness' but in reality it's generally going to be about as effective as pissing into the wind. By contrast, anybody can start a company and start making whatever they want to. And indeed maybe SpaceX would be the proper epilogue here.

Enter corporations. Elon Musk wanted to send a greenhouse to Mars. The costs were unacceptable. It made no sense to him why a rocket that cost on the order of tens of millions of dollars in materials would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to contract. And indeed it didn't make any sense. So he started a company and changed it. Now costs are down by nearly an order of a magnitude, SpaceX is one of the world's largest supplier of launches, and it's looking increasingly likely that the first person to leave our orbit in nearly half a century won't be doing so on a government rocket, but on a privately built, privately funded, and privately launched rocket.

Of course SpaceX would never have been able to get to where they are without governmental contracts and assistance, so I'm not proposing anything like anarcho-capitalism, but rather that government should is the one that provides the sandbox - the people are the ones that build as they choose.