The other thing is the vast majority of the government's budget is Medicare, DoD, and social security which are all still operating to my knowledge.
Governments operate federal parks, but there are also private parks which are just as well kept, sometimes even better - and they do it at much lower costs. See for example, this small public bathroom which cost $2M to build: https://twitter.com/JohnStossel/status/1077921975123804162
Such enormous waste of resources is so common in many areas of government, and if they operated like any regular business they would be bankrupt overnight. Of course it did not take $2M to build that little shack - there is a huge amount of corruption and everyone involved is taking their slice of the taxpayer's money.
In Texas I've been to over ten government run parks (like ones you'd go camping in), and I've never even heard of a private one.
The real problem is government is too damn big that it becomes impossible to separate out such concerns from every other aspect of government, and each time government expands, it adds more inefficiencies.
A park should be a self-contained enterprise so that it doesn't need outside government spending. If you take for example, Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo, you need to pay 100 yen to enter the park. The park gets millions of visitors a year, and the money it takes can easily pay for the upkeep of the park. It could be completely private, but in this particular case it is inherited from the imperial estate and is run by the government. The fee has the additional advantage that it keeps out vandals and thugs - only people who want to enjoy the park will pay for it.
Highways in Japan are mostly toll roads too. They're operated as companies with the intent on making profit. Some are privately owned, although most are government owned. The "who will build the roads?" complaint is one of the most common attempts to retort the argument for small government.
You and I both know this is not the cause of a 86% of expenditures.
> The real problem is government is too damn big that it becomes impossible to separate out such concerns from every other aspect of government, and each time government expands, it adds more inefficiencies.
Do you mean too damn big by % of gdp? If so we could double the size of social security and not change the costs of infrastructure.
Do you mean too damn big by employment? If so during census years infrastructure costs don't change much.
If you mean by number of regulations? I think reducing regulations could definitely decrease the cost of infrastructure, but this isn't what most people mean when they talk about the size of government. Texas is a very conservative state with little welfare, not very many services provided by the government, but we have an enormous amount of regulations. An incredible amount of red tape and laws.
This is missing my point. The point is that if it were a private development, then they would be sacked and replaced. This isn't some isolated case and many areas of government are similarly ineffective. The problem is that you can't just replace the one area - the government isn't modular enough to fix its individual parts - it's a monolith.
When I say the government is too big - it's trying to do too many things, and does most of them badly. Markets are better at selecting for efficiency than a single centralized entity. Each 'ministry' or whatnot should be a distinct entity, and should operate like a for-profit business. If one ministry is performing poorly, it could be replaced with a different company in a free market. The threat that they could lose such a contract would force them to perform. No performance, no job - like the rest of us.
To be clear, I'm not for "no government," but for very limited government and little regulation. Governments should not be interfering in markets for instance. Things like environmental regulations are obviously more complex issues which require people to come together for solutions rather than competing.
Another example of a more free market is the education system in Sweden. Instead of funding people to go to the nearest public school to them, they give vouchers for education which are redeemable at any school, private or public, and children can choose. There are no restrictions on location. Because private schooling is almost always better than public schooling, this system has caused the public schools to improve out of necessity - they're competing for children to get the funding - in turn the private schools need to innovate to retain their edge. The result is an overall improvement of the entire education of the country, and reduced government spending.
This is just passing the buck. Right now the government bid out the creation of a bathroom and it was done expensively. But you are arguing that if the government bid out the entire parks system it would be done really well? I don't follow the logic. In my experience the more complex the RFP the more the sophisticated parties(the bidders) are going to fuck the unsophisticated party(the government). It's easy to specify what a bathroom should be and take the lowest bid. It's way harder to do that with the park's department.
And not everyone thinks the Swedish model is a success. Lots of people blamed them for causing Sweden to have some of the fastest dropping test scores in the world. And I'm not arguing privatization is always a failure. I'm just arguing that it's not always a success, and that it's success and failure is dependent upon how it's done. I'm not sure why you are so privatization is always a success every time when clearly the historical record says it's a mix of successes and failures.
You argue the government should be smaller. 5/6ths of the government is insurance(medicare/medicaid/social security)+military and then 1/6th is everything else. That includes education, protecting the environment, funding research, parks etc..
I would love the government to be smaller, I don't think we need to spend so much on the military but I do like social security, medicare, and medicaid. I don't want to be in the position where I have to decide between mortgaging my house or letting an elderly relative die of cancer. And it's really nice we don't have to make those decisions.
Eastern Oregon has gone the route at one point for fire fighting, and recently went and closed libraries, leaving it to local towns to rebuild said service. Private offerings for services that are a public good tend to either be expensive and poor quality (unreliable, limited service) for these things that were formerly community funded, leaving me with little faith that privitization would do anything besides add cost.
Government is like a conglomerate and each area of interest is like a subsidiary. The problem is, every single one of their subsidiaries is constantly in the red, year on year. They're completely bankrupt! The only way they survive is by lending more money and collecting more taxes, instead of operating like for-profit businesses which create wealth, rather than take it away.
You can still have community funded enterprises, but they need to be affordable, in the sense that there is not an infinite pot of money they can keep pulling from if they overspend. A fire-service, for example, could charge residents of an area a small monthly fee for operating in that area - and those not willing to pay the fee would simply be deprioritized in the event of any fire on their property. Business owners could pay a premium to have a higher priority. Ideally the fire service will operate in profit, and such profits can be used to improve the service or even partially reimburse the creditors if they've 'overpaid' for the service.
This kind of system obviously can't operate together with the public service if taxes are forcibly collected for the latter. People aren't going to pay for something they've already paid for. To put these systems in place, the existing public services need to be privatized (joint-stock where the users of the service can be part owners), and their tax needs to be reduced by at least the amount they were previously paying which contributed to the former loss-making enterprise.
The overall point is that this system can be self-correcting on a per-service basis. You don't need to wait 4 years to pick between two companies to perform all the services if they're doing badly. If a service is doing badly, and there is a demand for something better, somebody will fill that gap. The mere presence of a big monolithic government is a hinderance to innovation in any service that it provides. The only way the services get improved are from the inside - there is no outside pressure to innovate - much less so if it means that the people inside might be risking their own jobs by making the service more efficient.