It's all marketing at the end of the day.

But tbf, after a decade of a many public sector projects, I have first-hand seen really incompetent and wasteful actions on huge scales. Perhaps there should he a whistle blower program for reporting such things?

> incompetent and wasteful actions on huge scales

As others have pointed out, this is independent of whether we're talking about the government or private sector.

Regardless, when I see workers on a road crew standing around I don't think "wasted tax dollars", I think "money going back into the economy."

Of course in my view of a fair society it would be a preponderance of idle, wealthy money that is going back into the economy.

There is a fundamental difference between public and private and that is one of consent. We have no consent when it comes to government actions.

Look at the amount of money wasted on the the war on drugs.

Where do you think wealthy money is if not in the economy?

Oh, but tons of people totally believe in the war on drugs and voted for politicians who directly support that crap. So it's "kinda" consented to, in fact explicitly sought. Just like all the "tough on crime" crap we get to hear about, so many of us think it's utterly ridiculous and the absolute wrong approach, but many are also all about that philosophy and absolutely want the government enacting such policies.

> Where do you think wealthy money is if not in the economy?

Being leveraged to extract rents, the very enemy of productivity.

>Where do you think wealthy money is if not in the economy?

How about tied up in physical assets like artwork, which they then use in a scam to lower their tax liability? That seems like one option, explored within the article under discussion.

>As others have pointed out, this is independent of whether we're talking about the government or private sector.

being able to boot people is a huge difference. You could make the company millions in one month and be fired the next month by a private company, simply because it gave them an extra dollar for their quarterly earnings statement. There's an actual process for ejecting an incompetent public sector employee, to a point that it's much easier to reassign them instead. Contractors are a whole other issue as well, especially with the ways government signs contracts.

>Of course in my view of a fair society it would be a preponderance of idle, wealthy money that is going back into the economy.

that should theoretically be a function of the stock market... we all know how that ends.

Presumably the Russians have included it in the agenda of their 10 million++ person troll farm, the TRUE source of all negative rumours about Western nations (the Canadian government and journalists dismiss all sorts of things as being "factually" only Russian trolls, and the majority of the (online) public absolutely loves it!

Look at Japan, across the board, as just one example, now look at the US - you genuinely think there isn't substantial incompetence and corruption here?

Watch out for propaganda, it comes in many forms, from a variety of sources. One of those is your own consciousness.*

The history of the idea is quite interesting. It all start in the post-WWII period, right after the RAND Corporation was created to retain talent amid the US armed forces demobilization. Shortly after, a bunch of government agencies were being created and there was no abstraction defined to impose constraints on how they should operate and be funded, after some initial success with RAND's economists' policy analysis during the Kennedy administration, it began to spread to newly formed agencies and thus the language of efficiency gained weight. Then the Chicago school comes in, eventually antitrust starts to be dismantled with arguments like "if they raise prices too much, then competitors will come and eat their lunch", yadda yadda, completely ignoring entry barriers and today due to the flexibility of the language you have actors using government ineptness as a basis to decrease or halt any public spending when it suits them. It's a powerful way of assessing resource allocation, but it can't be the only one.