A government needs to be efficient so that instead of spending $2 billion on a bridge to nowhere, or a bureaucracy that spends millions of hours pushing papers but accomplishes nothing of merit by doing so, or a public housing authority that pays its workers to sleep on the job rather than inspect or repair the boilers, or a public employee pension program that gives away millions when you game the system with excessive overtime your last year, or any other myriad ways to waste society’s resources achieving nothing and worse than nothing - instead of that, it gets something valuable done, and society can benefit from that something.
Waste is not virtuous and you cannot prosper by continually breaking and repairing the same windows.
I think anyone who's had a job must realize that some waste goes on in the private sector. but a business that wastes more than it profits will eventually be sold for parts. a government isn't subject to the same constraints and can raise taxes or print money for a long time to paper over the rot.
there's also the argument that it's worse for a government to waste money than it is for a business. if someone runs their own business inefficiently, they are just wasting their own money. if the executives run a publicly-traded business inefficiently, this is a bit worse as they are wasting the shareholders' money. but an inefficient government is wasting everyone's money that they are compelled to contribute.
I disagree with every premise of your argument so I'm not sure if we're just going to talk past each other, but overall I could not disagree more:
>a business that wastes more than it profits will eventually be sold for parts
How many startups linked on this very site throw VC money into furnaces and have nothing to show for it (not even parts) after a few years? Where did all the Yik Yak money go?
>a government isn't subject to the same constraints and can raise taxes or print money for a long time to paper over the rot
Overall that may be true but individual departments and programs are certainly subject to those constraints.
>an inefficient government is wasting everyone's money that they are compelled to contribute
I'm not thrilled about the billions that have been wasted developing the F-35 but that's exactly how representative government works. I don't get a vote in the decisions of Google or Apple.
Waste is not virtuous and you cannot prosper by continually breaking and repairing the same windows.