> We seem to have decided, collectively, that we'd rather have more problems.
... because a faction of the rich decided they wanted the poors to believe government can't do anything useful, and launched an ongoing decades-long propaganda campaign to that effect.
I think that's an incredibly simplistic and naive view of why large public projects gobble up colossal sums of money and don't have much to show for it.
I'm sure a similar book could be written where the political stripes are all changed. Instead of Koch, we have Soros. Instead of Musk, it would be Gates. Instead of whoever owns Sinclair Media, its Carlos Slim or Lauren Powell Jobs.
A lot of that public money somehow ends up in the private sector, usually as corporate profits.
Libertarians may want to ask themselves what happens to the private sector - aerospace, energy, R&D, infrastructure, education - when public investment stops.
I am guessing that in your mind that if a private corporation bids on a contract it should only break even? Is that it? Or perhaps - for you - even better would be - the whole thing would be done by the government. There is no private corporation?
I have no doubt that a nationalized healthcare system would be bureaucratic and inefficient. But I also know our current system is worse by almost every metric and stays that way due to lobbying and, yes, propaganda against alternatives like Medicare for all.
You're correct to an extent, but "the rich" also have a point there. As a taxpayer, the level of waste and incompetence in government spending on those problems is horrifying. It doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to spend billions of dollars and decades of time just to get minor infrastructure projects completed.
