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This and every other small gov / gov inefficiency screed I've read glosses over the point that most of all those billions the government "wasted" is paid to pri

This and every other small gov / gov inefficiency screed I've read glosses over the point that most of all those billions the government "wasted" is paid to private (as in non-government) companies. Big portion of the rest is salaries. [The gov definitely employs too many people, but what ya gonna do? With our capitalist economy demanding abundance of consumers to support corporate bloat even if there's not enough work for them] The problem isn't government. The problem is corporatism & greed scamming/lobbying/abusing/leeching off of government. Inefficiency is a matter of scale. The private sector is not magically immune. Have you ever seen the money that big enterprise wastes? One or two guys in their garage can launch an iPhone app on a shoestring. It takes large corporation tens of thousands of dollars, months, and a dozen people. [spoken from direct experience].

drcode 16y ago
> Inefficiency is a matter of scale. The private sector is not magically immune. The companies in the private sector goes bankrupt if they don't keep inefficiency in check. The reasons larger companies exist is because economies of scale balance out the inefficiencies in some cases. > The problem is corporatism & greed scamming/lobbying/abusing/leeching off of government. You can't leach off the government if it doesn't have money to spend.
- jshen 16y ago
  I don't know how true this is. Many of the biggest companies are ... I don't know how to describe it so I'll call it quasi private. Telecommunications companies: use public air waves, depend on cable run all over the country that a startup can't duplicate, etc Large media companies: public air waves again. Natural resource exploiters: oil companies, logging companies, etc depend on extracting resources from a lot of public lands. Anything related to defense. And the final point, no matter how hard we wish there were a level playing field in the markets, big companies will always lobby for laws that favor them over smaller companies. Even if we have a minimal government we will still have things like contract law, patents, trademarks, etc. Large corporations will influence these laws.

drcode 16y ago

> Inefficiency is a matter of scale. The private sector is not magically immune. The companies in the private sector goes bankrupt if they don't keep inefficiency in check. The reasons larger companies exist is because economies of scale balance out the inefficiencies in some cases. > The problem is corporatism & greed scamming/lobbying/abusing/leeching off of government. You can't leach off the government if it doesn't have money to spend.

jshen 16y ago
I don't know how true this is. Many of the biggest companies are ... I don't know how to describe it so I'll call it quasi private. Telecommunications companies: use public air waves, depend on cable run all over the country that a startup can't duplicate, etc Large media companies: public air waves again. Natural resource exploiters: oil companies, logging companies, etc depend on extracting resources from a lot of public lands. Anything related to defense. And the final point, no matter how hard we wish there were a level playing field in the markets, big companies will always lobby for laws that favor them over smaller companies. Even if we have a minimal government we will still have things like contract law, patents, trademarks, etc. Large corporations will influence these laws.