The federal government's performance management system is broken by grade inflation, with over 80% of employees receiving top ratings. This makes it impossible to differentiate performance, leading to bonuses being spread thinly across the board and failing to meaningfully incentivize top talent or address underperformance.

A free market needs price signals to function, telling businesses what consumers want and enabling efficient resource allocation. Government-run enterprises eliminate this signal, leading to inefficiency, shortages, and economic collapse.

Calls to solve societal issues with higher taxes and more government spending miss the root cause. The government's core issue is a lack of competence and an excess of bureaucracy. Throwing more money into an inefficient system only exacerbates waste without improving outcomes.

By artificially lowering prices, NYC's proposed state-run grocery stores eliminate the price signals that guide resource distribution. This will create upward price pressure on goods, leading to empty shelves in either the state stores or competing private stores, with taxpayers footing the bill for the inevitable losses.

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.

Applying a core venture capital and business principle to public spending could radically improve outcomes. Governments should double down on competent, effective agencies while defunding and cutting losses on incompetent, failing projects.

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 private enterprises, government-run entities are inherently inefficient. They lack the two fundamental drivers of improvement: market-based price signals and direct competition, which remove any incentive to innovate or improve.

For many in government, the state is their "startup." They are incentivized to increase their budget and influence. This can lead to perverse outcomes where a homelessness agency's success is measured not by reducing homelessness, but by growing its budget, which paradoxically requires more homeless people.