You will fail (almost all of the time).

People tend to forget that when talking about waste. Almost every project, company, idea will end in failure. Pointing at the successes around us is a case of survivorship bias. Government projects fail all the time. Company projects fail all the time. Personal projects fail all the time.

So, looking at failures is really useless, it tells us nothing. In the end we have to look at return on investment. If the government spends $1 billion and $500 million is completely wasted, yet they get a $700 million return on the other half, that's not a bad deal. It's even better if that is money that private industry would have never invested in said technology.

And private industry is just as apt to chase bubbles leading to massive losses. When it becomes more profitable for private industry to invest in speculation in the short term a bubble occurs almost every time, followed by large economy damaging losses.

Agree completely, however companies tend to have better feedback loops to point to lack of ROI.

Better or shorter?

Must-solve, long shot things like GPS, Internet, Modern Weaponry require resolve behind it to make it happen.

I am sure those programs had hundreds offshoots trying things out to solve problem, to see if it works, within the umbrella of that major effort e.g. GPS.

ROI measured in terms of money results in drug companies chasing chronic pills than cures. That need not be the only measure.

Shorter = better in my world. The government could have that too if they did budgets differently.

Ehh, maybe.

Then again the Great Retail Apocalypse of 2017 may lead to to think otherwise. US retail is massively overbuild, most of that because the companies are allowed to take on tens or hundreds of millions of debt. This debt acts as a buffer "It's only bad now, it will be better soon, we promise". By the time feedback signals give a clear message that the investment will never be repaid investors are overextended and losses occur.

That industrywide, the individual companies will soon find out if the overinvested or not.

The old saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" always applies.

It really doesn't matter if you are a responsible company that takes on low/no debt if a significant number of your competitors take on debt, and their investors allow it. "Soon" is highly overrated. Amazon is going to make lots of money 'soon' unless they are wrong about future market conditions, yet their investors have given them a pass at reinvesting most of their money for growth. Entire industries can commit irrational actions for long periods of time and have plenty of analyst attempt to rationalize the situation.

Sure but the point is once the market dries up the companies will know. Thats not the same for governments who do their budgetting rather different.

The market is certainly not perfect. There is waste, bad investment, etc. There's no avoiding that. Unlike government, however, the market is much more efficient in realizing and correcting for that.

If only we had the evidence to support this sort of sweeping generalization. It's a nice theory on paper, in practice it seems to be more complicated depending on time scales and type of goal. There is a lot of no-true-scotsman-ing in support of the dogma, which muddies the waters. For people who want to affect actual change and believe in evidence-based approaches, it's really hard to avoid the conclusion that (today at least) you are best off with a mix.

This empirical mismatch is either handled by engaging in no-true-scotsman support for the dogma, or engaging

Having worked in both government and corporate environments, I don't see it. The efficiency of the market is about as mythical as the long term planning ability of the government.

Companies that waste too much go out of business and are replaced by organizations that are more efficient.

Governments that waste too much suck up ever more of your taxes or go bankrupt and cause misery for all.