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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

Private companies can certainly hold their own when it comes to waste and incompetence. Government doesn’t have a monopoly on these things.

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Companies certainly can be wasteful and incompetent.

But at least they won't put you in prison if you decide not to buy their product.

If they do that for long enough though they go out of business. There is not really an equivalent to going out of business in government, or at least the bar is much higher for it to happen (I.e. violent revolution).

> There is not really an equivalent to going out of business in government, or at least the bar is much higher for it to happen (I.e. violent revolution)

There's absolutely an equivalent, publicly elected officials lose re-election campaigns all the time.

Is a failed government policy generally stopped and corrected by an electoral change in practice? In my experience this almost never happens. Whereas if a company goes under, whatever failed action it was taking just stops happening. Not equivalent IMO.

Agreed. There is very rarely a sober look back on any government policy to see if it actually met the objectives it set out to achieve, and at what cost.

Clearly you've never worked in the government.

No, but both my parents spent their careers working in the VA system, which routinely trounces private health care in measures of efficiency.

If a private company wastes too much, it eventually goes out of business.

If a government entity wastes too much money, their budget is increased for the next fiscal year. There is no feedback loop to govern the waste.

Agreed, but private companies also face competition (which incentivizes as little waste as possible) that the government does not.

Competition over the past couple decades is less and less of a factor for private companies, however[1].

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-th...

The harder it is to create a startup in an area, the less competition you’ll have there. Things like regulation and labor protection laws have the unfortunate side effect of discouraging founders to embark in the "startup adventure".

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