[temphn]

  I'm almost certain you're not arguing that "dollars 
  generated per person" is the only valid measure of the 
  success of a government

Sure, it isn't the only measure of success, but if this number is very low then that is (I would argue) a measure of failure. "Dollars generated per person" = tax-revenues per person is very similar to GDP-per-capita. And a high GDP-per-capita means you can spend on healthcare, earthquake proof buildings, and all kinds of standard-of-living improving stuff.

  So how do you factor in all the other measures of success 
  in such an evaluation?

I think that many -- not all -- are downstream of dollars generated per person. The more dollars per person, the more money for science, for public works, for roads and bridges, for charity, for whatever you want. You can't buy love, but you can buy most of the lower level items in Maslow's hierarchy, no?

  Trivially, corporations are amoral entities that have the 
  ability, and sometimes the obligation, to jettison lines of 
  business that lose money or simply don't contribute enough 
  profit, whereas governments often have the legal or moral 
  obligation to maintain or expand "lines of business" whose 
  purpose does not coincide with the generation of cash. 
  Civilization necessitates at least some pursuits that will 
  never make a profit, and governments are the major 
  organizational entities (yes, there are some others) that 
  are often left to such pursuits.

Sure. But I guess my claim is that in order to pursue those other "lines of business", governments must still post a profit (more tax/fees than expenditures). The alternate school of thought (promoted by Cheney and Krugman alike) says that deficits don't matter and that governments cannot go bankrupt.

[I might also quibble with your use of the term "amoral" to describe businesses and "moral" to describe governments, as most of the millions of people dead in the 20th century were killed by governments. You have to kind of go back to the East India Company to find something comparable for businesses (and even that was a public/private hybrid). Anyway, digression, my apologies.]

[redler]

I'm trying to be very careful to avoid responding to things you're not actually saying. This would be more fun to discuss over some beers.

Trying to tiptoe away from Godwin, I'll agree the use of moral/amoral is worth the quibble. Certainly it's people who have morals, and institutions that have, at best, ethics or principles. I'm not trying to argue that governments are moral, although they do take on responsibilities that corporations cannot or would not, and that such responsibilities can create something like a moral obligation -- operating on an axis that does not include a profit factor -- without imbuing the institution with "morals" per se.

[temphn]

Cool, yeah, beer is awesome. Appreciate the discussion.

Another way to express what I'm saying is this:

Individuals do lots of things that aren't directly for profit, like open source or art or helping out a friend. But over the long term they need to create more wealth (apples, chairs, computers, etc.) than they consume.

Groups of various kinds (companies, etc.) do lots of things that aren't for profit, like throwing birthday parties for their members or having their people sponsor charity runs for research. Yet they too need to have wealth creation exceed wealth consumption to survive in the long run.

Municipalities and local governments -- ditto. Municipalities provide services in exchange for property taxes, and they can/do go bankrupt. We're seeing that happen to CA cities now.

Now, a federal government is definitely special in some key ways: it can order guys with guns to your house and coordinates national defense. But you can still model this as a municipality that is competing with other national governments for your tax dollars. Immigration is in part about getting a better deal from country A and moving from country B.

This is not how we've been raised to think about government. Many on the broad political right are sort of emotional about the federal government's defense efforts; many on the broad political left are sort of emotional about the federal government's non-defense efforts. And in our current world it is kind of unpatriotic to just think of them as a service provider: "are they keeping the peace at low cost? are they pursuing the right strategy for long term health?".

There are macroeconomic arguments as well about whether the "government is or should be modeled as a company", but really you do get at a good point in that the idea that government is just a service provider cuts against the grain of American thought, both left and right.

However, it is an interesting line of analysis that is gaining in currency. See for example KP's "USA Inc.", which looks at the USA as if it was a company:

images.businessweek.com/mz/11/10/1110_mz_49meekerusainc.pdf

While physical proximity will always mean banding together for common defense (so long as we are corporeal beings!), I'd argue that the internet makes migration-to-a-better-service-provider a much more feasible option. Facebook facilitates transnationalism: your friends are sometimes nearby, sometimes on other continents, but they often aren't your neighbors. Skype and all these telecommuting tools allow you to work remotely as well.

Moving doesn't have the same cost that it used to. Making the cost of migration plummet could be very important.

[YokoZar]

By this reasoning, a government that operated more efficiently would be less successful. That can't possibly be right.