We have a primitive notion that the private sector is more efficient than government. It’s nonsense. The private sector is horribly inefficient. Most businesses fail. They waste tons of money. As long as they’re profitable, we allow the inefficiencies. Government is just a target because there’s no profit.

Monopolies are incredibly inefficient. Our internet, phone and television providers are monopolies. They waste tons of money on advertising, trying to steal customers from each other, but they charge high fees and offer slow services. Compare this to England where the government opened up the competition and prices are less than 1/10th the price for better service.

This article has a good quote about America’s internet access:

We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we’ve seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight.

Inefficiency happens in government not because of the lack of competition, but because there’s no governing board or executive. No one’s pushing for results. No one is holding Congress accountable. Congress allocates money, but We, The People are neither guiding them nor monitoring them. We just grumble and every two years and our political process almost forces us to reelect them.

There are three basic ways Americans approach government. Some of us assume there should be competition. This makes us blame government instead of fixing it. The real problem with government is that we’re not taking responsibility for it by supporting a system like PeopleCount.org.

And then there are those who argue for partisan solutions. We need to fight ourselves better and beat ourselves. We must wrestle power away from “the misguided Americans.” We blame each other instead of taking responsibility for fixing it.

And the third group are tired of all the blaming and justify their resignation. They argue that it’s too hopeless to even consider taking responsibility for our government.

Then there are those of us who propose solutions. All too often we, too, complain instead of working together to make our solutions work. Blame isn’t going to solve our problems. It’s time to take positive steps.