> which functions a government ought to serve compared to private industry (For what it's worth, and in case it helps clarify my stance here, my opinion on thi

> which functions a government ought to serve compared to private industry (For what it's worth, and in case it helps clarify my stance here, my opinion on this is that if it's a necessarily monopolistic or universally-mandated function, it should be part of the government; if it's a function where meaningful competition is possible, let capitalism do its thing. The goal being to provide some recourse when things go wrong: If my private daycare sucks I can just go to a different one, no problem. If my government prison system sucks I can at least theoretically vote the people responsible out of office. But when there's no opportunity for meaningful choice or competition, there's no benefit to privatization, it's just inserting a middleman who can skim some profit off the top. This still leaves a lot of important gray area -- education and health care remain thorny issues for example -- but I hope I've demonstrated that I don't hold the simplistic "everything should be government!" stance you appear to have ascribed to me.)