> How is this possible? Private companies, minus special government favors, have to deliver a product that customers want for a price that customers are willin

> How is this possible? Private companies, minus special government favors, have to deliver a product that customers want for a price that customers are willing to pay. If they are too inefficient at either identifying what those products are or at what price they should charge (both examples of inefficiency) there is no profit and eventually the funds run out and the business fails. Insofar as they can identify the right product and deliver it at a cost less than the price, they are efficient. In some ways, the profit is a measure of the efficiency of the enterprise. A state owned enterprise however has no such penalty against inefficiency. A government can redirect resources from more efficient and productive parts of the economy to projects that would otherwise fail under private enterprise. That redirection does not depend on the will (whim?) of consumers/customer: taxation and money minting allow for bypassing the typical constraints of voluntary consumer/customer wants, needs, and value-for-value trade. One can read this to mean that efficiency, under a system of state owned enterprises, is nice-to-have rather than a matter of survival.