| As someone who has actually worked for both the US government and the private sector - this isn't true: > There is no difference in the potential for waste, inefficiency, fraud, corruption, laziness, and outright stupidity between government and private systems. The inefficiency that I saw in the government was far greater than that of the private sector. To some extent, it had to be - the government has to be extremely reliable and accessible (while most companies content themselves with 99.99% website uptime, or only serving people with a mailing address, or whatever - the government has to serve everyone and be available as much as possible), and that's a good thing. But beyond that, factors such as extreme risk aversion (which generally grows with the size of an organization), gross incompetence, and outright corruption made the government far less efficient than what I experienced in industry - to the point where it was an old-and-not-funny-anymore running joke among my government colleagues. Moreover, the government also holds massive influence over your life that corporations do not and cannot: taxes, monopoly on violence, control of the legal system, ability to enact and enforce regulation, and many more. It should be pretty clear that separation of powers is a good thing, and only an idiot would decide that it's better to consolidate as many things as possible into a single central entity that also uniquely holds all of those powers. > There is a difference in (1) my (and my fellow citizens) ability to influence between that two Ability to influence? Yes, you have ability - but the amount of actual influence exerted on government in the US is minimal. Public opinion in the US has almost zero correlation on the law[1]. The political process is overwhelmingly dominated by a small amount of wealthy and powerful individuals and special interest groups. It's absolute insanity to take this mess and put more things in control of it. > (2) not having to pay for profit and the costs to me resulting from necessary profit on top of the rest of the shit sundae Well, as we've already established, the government is significantly less efficient than industry - and even if it wasn't, the extra margin that you have to pay is a trivial price to the utterly insane alternative of the government controlling all private industry. [1] https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba |