My take is that government is like a really lazy college student. Goimg to the library to study would be hard, and you’d need vision and motivation to do it. Instead, you take the money given to you by your parents, buy the best textbook there is on the subject, and put it on your shelf. You haven’t actually achieved anything. But you still feel a sense of accomplishment. You paid money. You bought something. That counts. Or at least so you tell yourself. And so does the government. It’s basically all Y Combinator rules, reversed.
I think oversimplifications like this are rooted more in ideology than reality.
Government has of course done, and continues to do, many vital things well for its citizens in many countries around the world (universal healthcare, for ex.).
There has also, of course, been a push for generations by capital to privatize its various functions, and one of the most common approaches is to defund and degrade an aspect of the government (see current admin) and then afterwards point to the degraded entity as an example of ineffective government that must be replaced by private enterprise.
If government were to infiltrate Apple, fire 80% of its staff at random, cut budgets across the board by 50-80%, put in place a CEO that has spent their entire career campaigning to rid society of the scourge of electronics, and refuse to fill necessary vacant positions for years, would it then be an intelligent assessment to say "man, private corporations like Apple really suck at making phones, they should be nationalized"?
I agree with you that, of course, there are people and units in government that may be highly skilled and efficient. From what I see, here in Germany, and I think in the United States as well, is that those are the exception and not the rule.
And how could it be otherwise? If your job is safe, and you have a fixed salary, the only way to increase your effective hourly wage is to do less work.
Again, there are people trying to work against the system. A former colleague of mine is a judge at a district court. When he started his position, he made an effort to apply himself fully to each case. For example, in a neighbourhood dispute, he actually went to the place with both parties and personally cut the branch from the tree that had given rise to the dispute. But the pressure is there to get files off the desk. So it’s a race to the bottom.
There are some idealists. But they are fighting an uphill battle, and they are paying a hefty price for not doing what the system wants them to do.
And of course, you could now argue that this is only a problem because government is being starved of the means to do its job properly. But let’s not forget: There was no income tax before the 1910s. And you Americans sank British ships because of what would’ve been an effective total tax burden of less than 5%.
I don’t know what percentage of your work goes to the government in the United States today. Here in Germany it is around 50%. And still, the government feels “starved“. And still it needs the Palantirs of this world to clean up its mess.
And, by the way, this is not just a thing with government. It’s a thing with all monopolies.
You have to have a need to be strong – otherwise you won’t be.
