Generally Government is dramatically more efficient than a comparable private business—the difference is that Government failings tend to be publicly available information, while a corporation can blow thirty million dollars on ineffective marketing and unnecessary consultants and you'll never know.
Corporations are way more efficient than governments in most areas. We know this since there are simply not a single government in the world that has implemented efficient versions of many of the things that private corporations easily do efficiently. The services government do is pretty much the same everywhere, roads, school, healthcare, police, military etc. But you don't see them run food distribution, grocery stores etc even though food certainly would be important enough for governments to do, its just that governments aren't good at doing it and many of the worst famines humanity has experiences are due to governments trying to control food production and distribution.
I didn't mean to imply that Government is a good fit for every particular sector, only that where there's a good fit, Government tends to be more efficient. Healthcare is where this distinction is extremely stark, but it applies to pretty much all universally subscribed services.
That's a bizarre take. What incentivises governent workers to be efficient? What incentives workers & owners of a private business to be efficient? Government isn't at risk of going out of business, and within a government department, doing a particular thing more efficiently can result in lower budget and reduced headcount. You might be talking about certain large enterprises that have become bloated and top-heavy with non-productive hires & survive by lobbying government to regulate & discourage smaller competitors, but that certainly doesn't describe most private companies.
It's only bizarre—and I'd agree it would be bizarre—if you interpret what I said as comparing a behemoth Government with a small and agile corporation. For the avoidance of any confusion, I'm talking about private entities which operate at a similar scale to its equivalent Government department.
Beyond a certain scale, massive inefficiency is the natural state of most corporations. It's just hard to find because the dirty laundry is rarely made public, and even then it's often concealed behind consultant fees, marketing budgets and other opaque expenditures.
You must work for some dipshit companies. Having worked with the government it’s like the most bureaucratic business you can imagine then multiple the bureaucracy by 5x.
That’s why cities like SF are attempting to redesign trash cans and spending $20k on each prototype.
That's probably only true for the developed countries. In the remaining ones, Government monopoly over anything is a path towards corruption and sub-standard work.
