It’s not. But with private enterprise you have a choice as to whether to do business with them or not. The government is a monopoly- and they have guns.
Private enterprise is also strongly regulated by the market. Private companies simply can’t get away with the kind of waste and abuse that government routinely does, and still survive.
Look at the Canadian Gun Registry. This is a database that is supposed to record every long gun in Canada. The original budget for it was 20 million dollars. To me, that sounds like a reasonable amount of money for such a database - on the high side, actually. But whatever.
The cost of the database started to balloon. So the government made a promise - if it goes over 100 million, we’ll kill it. Fine.
The price went over 100 million. The government didn’t kill it. It went to 200 million. Then 400 million. Then a BILLION dollars. For a gun database that should have about 3.5 million records. In the meantime, there were delays, errors, etc. To the point where the registry is pretty much useless - the data in it is wrong enough that it won’t be usable in court.
But the government hasn’t killled it. And now the auditor general for Canada has said that the registry is going to cost TWO BILLION dollars. For comparison, that’s about 20% of our entire military budget. For a database.
But now the government is pledging that it will never be killed. Where did the money go? What could have possibly cost 2 billion dollars? There’s lots of talk of sweetheart deals to cronies, bad financial decisions, poor cost control, etc. But we don’t know because getting information out of our government can be damned near impossible.
Now let’s consider a company that set up to offer a free-market gun registry. Long before this project got anywhere near a billion dollars, the axe would have fallen on it. This abuse would never have happened.
You guys in the states are still incensed about the abuses that happened with Enron, but here in Canada, a country 1/10 your size, it turns out that our politicians have been skimming hundreds of millions of dollars out of the public treasury. And they’re all still in power.
And look at Enron, and how the market reacted. Then compare it to how the government reacted. When the Enron scandal broke, investors started looking at every large company. Those with books that weren’t completely open, or who maintained good balance sheets through complicated and murky transactions, had their stocks decimated. The market sent a powerful message - clean up your books, reform your accounting, or we won’t invest in you. We don’t trust you. As a result, companies across the board underwent sweeping reforms in accounting. Even those who had done no wrong. The market corrected a flaw.
But how did the government react? It convicted a couple of guys, and went back to business as usual.
As John said, government is the only institution with a legal monopoly on force. That gives it a lot of power to escape accountability. It has the ability to raise almost unlimited funds through taxation. That also allows it to escape accountability. That is why government is dangerous.
We have guns. The government has nukular weapons.