But even the analytical speech is too strong: humanity has been down that road and it is fraught with other problems. Government isn't necessarily better either

But even the analytical speech is too strong: humanity has been down that road and it is fraught with other problems. Government isn't necessarily better either and like everything it must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Enshittification is inevitable, but would be easily undone if the anti-trust laws were properly enforced. It's a beautiful balancing act, and we can't get there by black-and-white "government bad/good, private bad/good". At least, that's what I think. It seems that people will only willingly act in the common good for small communities; at the level of government, you either enforce the common good, or you take advantage of greed and try to loosely direct it into the interests of the common good. Right now there is an argument to be made that we are not successfully achieving the latter strategy as "Value Creation" is now a bastardization of its original intent. But the former option is too diabolical to consider.