That's not what we did. Governments certainly hire private sector grifters as contractors; but those contractors still rely on the coercive power of the governm

That's not what we did. Governments certainly hire private sector grifters as contractors; but those contractors still rely on the coercive power of the government to force people to comply with whatever rules they are operating under. So the grifters are still government actors in the sense that matters: people can't choose to just ignore them or not deal with them, as would be the case with a true private sector company.