Inefficient companies _may_ go out of business. The problem is that this only happens if there’s more effective competition and clear market pressure across the

Inefficient companies _may_ go out of business. The problem is that this only happens if there’s more effective competition and clear market pressure across the board. Consider Google: they’re highly inefficient in many areas producing entire applications which are written off not long after release and failing to capitalize on areas they had substantial edges in (e.g. AI), (arguably their last successful product launch was in the 2000s) with the net result that they employed a ton of people doing things which were not really tied to satisfied customers. This didn’t matter because they had a few business areas where they had massive profits despite not having a government-enforced monopoly which more than made up for those losses. Most of the tech giants have variations on that theme where they have many people who can report absolutely absurd internal inefficiencies but until that’s broken out on a balance sheet it’ll probably never change. Government is unique in two ways: the first is that it’s more public (which is good, but e.g. you’d be shocked if Comcast was audited at the same level) but the other is that much of that inefficiency is mandated by the same people who complain about it in public. For example, benefits programs are often structured to require expensive validation processes which cost more than the savings, and there’s intense pressure to contract everything out even though that process requires significant overhead.