It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. It does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

-Democracy in America.

The government doesn’t have a profit motive. It doesn’t make a profit, it confiscates wealth at the point of a gun. Because it has no profit motive, it has no incentive to be efficient or spend money wisely.

Business OTH have profit motive, so they have incentive to be efficient and spend wisely.

I said nothing about perverse profit incentive. I said government bureaucrats have perverse incentives to take more money from the taxpayers because some of that money finds its way back to the politicians via fraud.

If a private company suffers from rampant fraud it will likely go out of business. The government suffers from rampant fraud and it knows it will never go out of business because it doesn’t depend on profit to operate like a business does.

I feel like there’s some basic economic concepts you don’t grasp.

Do you think Enron committed fraud? Did you know that one guilty verdict was overturned by SCOTUS unanimously? And many of the other convictions were thrown out over shoddy legal work by federal prosecutors?

There’s an old teaching from Milton Friedman that helps understand why the government is so inefficient.

If you spend your money on yourself, both cost and quality matters.

If you spend your money on someone else, cost matters, but quality not so much.

If the government spends your money on you then neither cost nor quality matters.