How so? Most don't own the means to produce all those things.
Most people buy those goods and choose between a range of available products. The fundamental flaw with that (at least as far as I see) is what happens if the products are unsafe. Imagine that FDA wasn't there (or its European equivalent) and companies could sell you anything whatsoever as food. How often have you gone shopping with a pestiside testing kid, a bacterial testing kit and a geiger counter? How do you know that all 15 type of shampoo you can buy don't all have mercury in them?
Basically both extremes don't work. A completely planned economy will not work but I have not seen a liberatrian utopia either so far.
The one advantage of the government is that at least in theory you can cast a vote to effect some change. You could not do that if you are run by Google.
Maybe I don't like Gmail and Gmail is the only mail in town, I can't force Google to change it. But can at least attempt to call my congressman if I don't like a particular upcoming bill.
Why does it have to be a government agency that's doing the testing? What's to stop a private company with a trusted brand from doing the testing and giving its stamp of approval? Their motivation to keep bad products from slipping through is very strong because their brand is their worth.
It is useful to note that it was the meat packers who lobbied the government for the creation of what became the FDA because they knew that the public would require some testing and the FDA would do it for little money. A private brand would of course have to charge more.
>Maybe I don't like Gmail and Gmail is the only mail in town, I can't force Google to change it. But can at least attempt to call my congressman if I don't like a particular upcoming bill.
If you don't like GMail, you can write your own email service. If enough people don't like it, odds are someone will have already written a competing service. Google cannot stop you from doing that. A government, however, can.
Of course, I think there's a middle ground. Too much government regulation is terrible for everyone, but too little disparately impacts those of little means.
No, right-wing Americans want to take care of themselves. They would just rather freely pay for certain services (health care, for instance) from competing private firms than be provided it by the government.
Framing the question as "who will clothe and feed and wash us" is implicitly a leftist framing. Taken literally, it rises to absurdity--physically, most people clothe and feed and wash themselves, and even more generally, it's hard to name a successful country where the government provides most people with clothing, food, or soap (though I'll grant the running water).