I like to mispell "guvmint", it's an old private joke. Sorry if you don't like it. But go ahead, read any insult you want into it, ignore the issues.
Private enterprise does a lot of things well. If it didn't, we would have gotten rid of it a long time ago. In fact, our culture invented what we now know as the commercial sector, because it suited (suits) our needs. But it is NOT why we are here. It is here to serve us, not the other way around, and I don't get why people don't understand this. It is merely one of the ways that we provide goods and services to one another. And if it fails to serve those needs, we have the freedom and obligation to change how it works. It is subservient to the surrounding culture.
Some insist on analyzing the behaviours of large multinational corporations as if they were the ma and pop store next door. They aren't, things are more complex than that.
Government is not as efficient as private enterprise. Of course it isn't. Why should it be? It does completely different things. Comparing the two, sector by sector, and saying, "see, I told you so", is silly. To be sure, governments occasionally stick their noses into places where it messes things up. The fix for that is NOT TO DO THOSE THINGS that way, it's not to say taxes are bad and shut down government. If your public governance structures have been taken over by corporate lobbying, then change THAT. I believe that is at the root of most of these issues. The government should be neutral, instead it has become the marketing arm of various factions. I don't know who they represent now, but it's not clear that they represent citizens, the people who voted. Too often they represent money, but that's not why they exist. It is a fundamental error.
Let me give another example of a private vs public debate. There is a lot of talk in western Canada about pipelines. They want to ship Alberta crude to the Gulf or other places to be refined. The il industry considers this efficient, because they already own the refineries down there and want to use them. So in this narrow sense, Canada would be shipping crude to the USA and would then buy back refined products. But the new government in Alberta suggested at one point that it might make more sense to have refineries in Alberta. In the larger picture, that might end up being less "efficient", depending on how you want to do the analysis. But maybe, just maybe, there would be lots of other benefit to Alberta (though maybe not the oil companies) to have local refineries. Those benefits are easy to imagine, good local jobs, a trained workforce, control of a strategic resource instead of sending it to another country. So who gets to make that decision? Why should it be left to private oil companies to make that decision? Maybe that's the kind of strategic societal decision that needs to be made by citizens. That's the job of government, it is not the job of private companies, whose self-interest DOES NOT necessarily align with that of the surrounding culture. To twist an old cliche, maybe what's good for General Motors, may not be good for the country.
