The difference that you will never understand:
Private enterprises, even large ones like Enron, sometimes go wrong and are immediately punished by the markets, broken up, and re-organized under new management-more competent, more honest, etc., as the case requires. The elements of that business that actually provided value to the public are preserved and enhanced by the new managers. And the new enterprise that arises may even go back to the public markets as a participant in the new economic future. THAT is creative destruction, the self-cleaning nature of the free enterprise system.
Contrast that with failed, wasteful, and fraudulent PUBLIC enterprise. The poisonous government agency builds a constituency with the public, which creates a well-financed interest group dedicated to it's preservation. Reform or abolishment occurs gradually over the decades, as the "interest group" grows stale, and loses it's key legislative support. In the meantime we foot the bills for continued fraud. In the private sector, Social Security and Medicare would have been broken up a generation ago, and their key leaders thrown out, and possibly even charged with crimes. Instead, we look forward to a small privatization milestone within the next few years, that will lead to finally ending the greatest fraud in human history by possibly the second half of this century.
Of course, by then several more public frauds may well be flourishing... |
