>But eventually, you live or die by the bottom line. By contrast, a government keeps existing no matter how poorly it manages its finances. Look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa, Greece, etc.
That's just survivorship bias. Some counterexamples:
This is an interesting counterpoint, but I'm not sure it's a counterexample: those governments kept existing, in the sense that the, say, Cuban government existed both before and after; they just had radical changes of direction and leadership. The same can and does happen to companies, and I think many casual observers would say that the business has survived.