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.