When governments become top shareholders, corporate focus shifts from pleasing customers to securing political favor and appropriations. R&D budgets are reallocated to lobbying, and market competition devolves from building the best product to playing the policy game most effectively, strangling innovation.

A paradoxical market reality is that sectors with heavy government involvement, like healthcare and education, experience skyrocketing costs. In contrast, less-regulated, technology-driven sectors see prices consistently fall, suggesting a correlation between intervention and price inflation.

According to James Burnham's "Iron Law of Oligarchy," systems eventually serve their rulers. In government, deficit spending and subsidies are used to secure votes and donor funding, meaning leaders are incentivized to maintain the flow of money, even if it's wasteful or fraudulent, to ensure their own political survival.

Runaway costs in education, housing, and healthcare stem from government intervention. When the government promises to provide a service (e.g., student loans), it becomes a massive "buy-only" force with no price sensitivity, eliminating natural market forces and causing costs to balloon.

The most effective government role in innovation is to act as a catalyst for high-risk, foundational R&D (like DARPA creating the internet). Once a technology is viable, the government should step aside to allow private sector competition (like SpaceX) to drive down costs and accelerate progress.

An entrepreneurial view of public goods dictates that any service should generate more value than its costs. If a division, like public transit, consistently loses money, it's a market signal that society doesn't value it at its current price. Subsidizing it is an emotional, not a logical, decision.

When a service like public transit is made free, it removes the financial incentives for efficiency and innovation. Without the pressure to compete for customers, bureaucracies swell, quality degrades, and problems like safety issues increase, ultimately making the service worse for its intended beneficiaries.

Unlike the private sector, government often focuses on offering employment rather than driving innovation. This inefficiency creates a buffer against AI-driven job cuts, making public sector roles paradoxically resilient, despite being a catastrophic waste of taxpayer money.

The "cost-plus" regulatory model allows utilities to earn a guaranteed return on capital investments (CAPEX) but no margin on operational expenses (OPEX). This creates a powerful, often inefficient, incentive for utilities to solve every problem by building expensive new infrastructure, even when cheaper operational solutions exist.