[ivewonyoung]

The big difference is that taxpayers are on the hook for government inefficiency and for most services there is no competition, the classic example being the DMV. Having one hour queues frequently is rare in private businesses.

Whereas with businesses they could go out of business if they overspend on inefficient processes and there can be competition on both quality and price.

One of the root causes is that it's very difficult to fire government employees for bad performance so that's why government services suck and cost a lot in almost every level of the government and in pretty much every country with some exceptions, like say the NTSB in the US.

It's not even that low performers should all be fired, but the fact that knowing you it's hard to get fired leads to many people underperforming given natural psychology. The other problem being lack of incentives tied to performance.

[ModernMech]

When the public government services are privatized, it's not going to look like a bunch of scrappy companies engaging in free market dynamics to deliver services better than the government could; it's going to look like darling contracts granted to crony insiders who leech tax dollars into offshore accounts while delivering the worst possible service they can get away with.

[MattPalmer1086]

The majority of people I worked with in government were actually very motivated. Sometimes it was public service, sometimes they were ambitious for their career, sometimes they just liked what they were working on.

I have not really seen more motivated people in business due to performance incentives. Even in the financial sector, other than maybe traders and quants, I can tell you most people don't work harder because of the annual bonus.

It was certainly a bit dispiriting working with the minority of people who appeared to do absolutely nothing and just hung around for years. We all knew we had to work harder because of them. Some of them would definitely have been fired in a business.