Daniel Greenfield writes in his excellent blog, Sultan Knish, No Business Like Government Business.

Excerpts:

More money doesn’t mean better or even workable government. It means the corporations and unions who are on the inside will take more money home and next year there will be an bigger deficit, because like a dumb beast, the system will eat as much as you give it. It will not stop, because there is no profit motive for the individuals running things to stop. They can only make money by spending money and they don’t have to make money to spend money because they control the cash flow..

On paper, the corporation exists to provide services to customers. In practice it exists to provide wealth to its boards, its suppliers and its employees. It is a non-profit, in the worst sense of the word, because its finances are unsustainable, it keeps going only by compulsively lying to everyone it owes money to, promising debtors that they will be repaid and customers that they will be served, while its insiders stuff their pockets full of stolen money.

Conflict of interest is completely natural. It is human nature for people to look after themselves and their friends first. It is also completely natural for a system to serve itself and to build its governance mechanisms in such a way that everyone on the inside gets paid and almost everyone on the outside gets screwed. It’s all natural, but so is murdering your neighbor for his camels and his wife.

Governments are set up to restrain the sort of natural abuses that flow out of human nature. The American variety of it was an experiment that tossed out a ridiculously corrupt system dependent on access and birth, and replaced it with one that depended as little on government as possible. It was still corrupt from the first, because it was still human, but it was much less corrupt than all the other alternative systems to it because everyone had limited veto power over it and unlimited immunity from it in many areas.

Since then we have gone from a system that limited its own power to a system whose ideologues cry for unlimited power and spin us the wonders of universal college education and green energy that they will produce for us if only we let them do whatever the hell they want. But at least it’s not one of those horrible big corporations. Then we might actually have a choice whether to do business with it or not.

 HKO
We are a victim of our own success.  We have become so good at using our creative powers to overcome scarcities that we believe scarcities do not exist.  In our pursuit to serve every human need we threaten our ability to produce the wealth that serves our basic needs.  The limited government that was so essential to our success has been sacrificed to a thirst for power masquerading as altruism and public service.
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