[boucher]

But they are completely different.

On the most basic level, governments are responsible to their citizens and their only purpose is to serve those citizens.

Companies are responsible only to their shareholders, who may or may not be their customers. Their only goal is to earn money for those shareholders.

Companies get to pick their customers, governments do not.

The examples you give are instructive. Intuit spends a tremendous amount of money lobbying against improvements to the American tax system that would benefit everyone, because that would mean fewer profits for them. Fedex competes in some ways with the USPS, but USPS provides a government mandated service to every remote region of the country, which a private company would not do, because as a country we decided that service was an important function of government. Plus, Fedex actually uses USPS for a significant percentage of their deliveries.

[nickpsecurity]

"On the most basic level, governments are responsible to their citizens and their only purpose is to serve those citizens."

In the US, the default is to appear to support citizens while doing a mix of what lobbyists pay for and actually serving citizens. The mix favors the rich folks' lobbyists whenever there is a conflict. The leaked Citigroup memos called this a plutonomy, a capitalist form of plutocracy.