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We don't/shouldn't have to pay businesses though.
by HKH2 3y ago
We don't/shouldn't have to pay businesses though.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoWe certainly do have to, at least for certain values of “we”. An example in the US is the current legal obligation to procure private health insurance. (There are exceptions to this obligation, generally lack of means, and in turn may qualify one to procure private insurance with tax subsidies.)
- freddie_mercury 3y agoThere hasn't been a legal obligation to have private health insurance since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which was 7 years ago. But still, your point stands, despite the specific example no longer being true.
- dataflow 3y agoThere are still some states that require health insurance.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoI had to refresh my memory, so I looked it up. What I see now is that the mandate is technically still law, but the tax penalty was eliminated. Not that it’s a meaningful distinction, just an odd legal artifact.
- xav0989 3y agoSome things like car insurance are a legally mandated purchase from a private business.
- antihipocrat 3y agoNo, but we already do. Huge amounts of public money is spent by government on consulting firms, private contractors and industry grants/incentives. Yet the public doesn't generally consider these firms to be publicly funded organizations, despite taxpayer money being the primary revenue source for many of them.
- Jensson 3y agoThe government switches external firms as soon as another firm seems to be able to do it better, that isn't true for the governments own parts. That makes the two fundamentally different, one can accumulate bloat forever the other will get renewed from time to time. Private profit seeking adds overhead though so which one is better depends on the domain we are talking about, in some cases private are better in other government are better.