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Comment by krisroadruck | Hacker News Reader

Brother the government just labels "profit" differently. Most people would call it grift, pork, or "inefficiency". Government waste dwarfs private sector waste by orders of magnitude. The utopia where governments efficiently and wisely put our tax dollars to their best use doesn't exist, never has, and likely never will.

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Mostly because government today pays out the nose for contracted labor rates as doing anything in house has been blown apart by free market reaganists over the years.

The soviet union, the only non-capitalist country ever to have a technology comparable to ours, was really fucking inefficient. E.g. Soviets had 50% higher CO2 output per ton of steel than the U.S. due to poor energy efficiency.

There was a time when american steel was inefficiently made too.

These figures are comparing steel making in two highly industrialized countries at the same time.

And different orgs may arrive at different efficiency levels in different time scales. Says nothing about the merits of for profit vs nonprofit business.

That utopia exists, the only problem is it is a communist country where you have no individual rights and can't own land.

It exists here too in small subsets of government. A parks dept that hires their own landscapers instead of contracting with a landscaping company is such an example of this utopia. A municipal power company with greatly reduced rates in comparison to a private utility. A university that runs its own prep kitchen facility over prepackaged GFS/cisco.

It's never existed in this industry.

So what? If you needed precedence for everything to happen, nothing new would ever happen.

People talk about the industry like there was a time the government built it's rockets, then SpaceX stole money that was meant for NASA and now NASA can't build rockets anymore.

I am aware the US has operated in this reliance on for profit contractor model for a very long time. I just think it is stupid, costly, and only really serves to make connected individuals extremely rich, at the cost of wider innovation potential. People balk at the cost of large government in house projects like the manhattan project, well imagine that cost if the government had to pay contractor rates on that project instead of doing it in house. Twice as high perhaps given how these contracts usually are pricing in cost overruns in addition to profit margin?

Have you actually looked up the history of government owning its own defense contractors? Please tell me you have actually learned about this history. Because if you think having things like this be nationalized, I suggest you read some of that history.

> People balk at the cost of large government in house projects like the manhattan project, well imagine that cost if the government had to pay contractor rates on that project instead of doing it in house.

If you were actually serious, and not a political shill then you wouldn't pick one random example without anything to compare it to. You are just making assertions based on literally nothing.

And if you knew something about SpaceX and NASA you would know that NASA own internal investigation suggested that actually NASA should be in the business of doing basic things that companies are perfectly good at doing.

The Manhatten project was something large and very new on the cutting edge of science. Launching rockets in the 1960s was that, it isn't anymore. Instead of the government doing everything, allow fair contracting and companies can compete on offering the government a cheap price.

> how these contracts usually are pricing in cost overruns

Yeah I mean governments don't have cost overruns, I mean the great leader said there wouldn't be any, so we know they can't exist.

Once again, profit is a cost.

It may actually just show a gap in knowledge.

I'm sure you've heard of trade secrets before

Not sure how trade secrets are dismissing the point of profit being a cost.

They dismiss them because if you know how something is made and your competitors don't, you always have a market edge. I consider the RD-180 engine from Russia better than Merlins from SpaceX, for example.

You can charge more or make higher margins at the market clearing price.

I thought everyone has done at least one semester of microeconomics at high school level, but the internet challenges my assumption frequently.

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