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Government can do things well, or badly

Private sector can do things well, or badly

I don't see what people find so hard to understand about this

When private sector fails, it goes out of business and other competent businesses take over.

When government fails it spends more tax dollars and does the same thing over again, expecting a different result.

But when the private sector does something it optimises for money.

When the government does something it can optimise for other things.

Both are systems that in certain circumstances suck. One isn't better than the other in every circumstance.

Yeah, this.

Private sector tends to fail at spending correctly for the long term. e.g. the 100 year time horizon required for healthcare.

Government tends to fail at spending on anything that might generate a media backlash (wars excepted) which is probably a good thing in general but can lead to them failing to do the right thing on some occasions. Also extreme risk averseness can lead them to over focus on risk management rather than actually achieving the aim, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation by private companies which can offer the former at the expense of the latter.

The existence of companies like Accenture stands as a strong counter-argument. You can fail for a long time before going out of business.

If you’ve been in any kind of business where you have a view of how the business works, you’ll find that nobody has a monopoly on incompetence.

I have worked in Fortune 100, late startup, local and state government. All had remarkably dumb practices. The startups were the most corrupt and wasteful, local government was the most limited in capability. Comparing big gov to big Corp, the workers are much better in the gov and the leaders are better in Corp.

>> When private sector fails, it goes out of business and other competent businesses take over.

Unless it is a bank, or an important tool for surveillance (e.g. Facebook in 2020). In which case losses are irrelevant and it is ultimately bailed out by the government.

And in reality, there is always an "unless" caveat:

- Farming subsidies - auto bailouts - Bank bailouts - No bid defense contracts

I don't understand why discussions on HN always go back to speaking in terms of economic absolutes. Those do not exist in reality, because the world is made of numerous complex, interdependent relationships between different economic entities.

Economics is not a science in which you can measure out indicators into petri dishes and observe them in a controlled environment. Quoting Milton Friedman like scripture simply belies a glaring misunderstanding of how the world works.

You know there are no private companies that provide border security. And it's nonsensical to even believe that there could be It's obviously a government function unless you think the right amount of border security is none.

What this shows me is how inefficient and corrupt a private company is. It also shows me how effective this one government agency is at rooting out corruption before 5% of a contracted amount has been spent.

(Edited for spelling)

> What this shows me is how inefficient and corrupt a private company is

People tend to forget: private companies are only efficient at keeping the stock price up. If it's not going to have an impact on the bottom line the waste can be insane.

Example off the top of my head: when I was working in Perth I had to process laptops for a mining company. 3-year update on laptops. Employees came to us, offering to pay out of pocket, market price, for their old work laptops -- that was rejected as a security risk; people might take home data or something!

Instead, we tossed em in a dumpster, only the lappys of the executives or senior leaders were wiped or DBAN'd.