The private sector has one sole motivator: the profit incentive. All else is incidental, including the oft touted "making the world a better place". Some compan

The private sector has one sole motivator: the profit incentive. All else is incidental, including the oft touted "making the world a better place". Some companies do make an impact, like pharmaceutical companies developing a COVID vaccine or Tesla leading the charge towards using electric vehicles instead of dinosaur fueled ones. Strictly speaking, for a job not be wasteful in the private sector, it's only required to be useful, not meaningful - but it could be. Given the motivation, "waste" has a narrow definition in the private sector: anything that doesn't contribute to the baseline. Non-waste can take many forms, e.g. improving product quality, reducing costs, managing brand perception, market research or regulatory capture. There is wiggle room for subjective assessment, like when companies see IT not as a catalyst but a cost centre and therefore fundamentally waste. The government has a different motivator entirely: the greater good. Waste and inefficiency take on another meaning in that context. Digging and filling ditches isn't wasteful if it ensures people have an income. In a government context, it's a useful job because it achieves stated goals, but still a meaningless one. The wars on terror and drugs are examples where it becomes more murky. For some, they are both useful and meaningful. For others, they're just one or perhaps neither. There are also government projects that seem like waste at the time but turn out to have tremendous value and even be private sector useful today. Examples are legion in military inventions that later became staples, such as microwave ovens, the Internet, cell phones. Regardless of how you feel about landing on the moon and NASA in general, we have now have non-stick pans, GPS and solar panels. In summary: looking at government through the lens of the private sector is failing to understand a simple truth: corporations are individualistic, where governments are collectivist even in a capitalist system.