and without competition it is impossible to get accurate prices to see if those services are being provided at...well, competitive prices. Most government programs involve price gouging.

One of the common ways for the government here to provide said services is to buy it from competing companies. So the government decides what to buy, then the fabled "market" decides the price.

government contracting private corporations is different from normal market conditions. observe any corporation that competes for government contracts.

How is it different? The buyer specifies what they're looking for, and companies tell them how much they want to do the job. It's a common practice in any market.

i don't have a good intoductory book to recommend off the top of my head if you're unaware of the insanely corrupt world of government contracting. I thought it was common knowledge as it gets reported on from time to time.

oh, the short answer is that government doesn't behave as a regular customer. with regular customers you don't have such binary outcomes of huge contract or no business at all.

Well, that depends on the size of the contract. There's no natural law that says that governments have to buy everything in vast chunks. And they don't, at least not over here.

Everything that takes place in the vast scale is prone to corruption, regardless if the buyers and sellers are private or public.

> I'm not sure how things work in the US, but in some parts of the world the governments actually use the income from taxes to provide valuable services to their population.

Are those services valuable enough that the folks that use them would pay what it costs to provide them?

I like it when other folks buy things for me as much as the next person. However, doing that on a large scale ends up being a way for middlemen to take from everyone and much of the "free stuff" is a mistake.