> Those profits they're chasing above all else are a powerful driver for innovation and optimization.

They are also a powerful driver for exploitation both of employees and of the general public.

Be careful with what you wish for. I certainly prefer dealing with a public sector that still operate on fax machines but that still may fundamentally work for the public good (as inefficient as it may be), than with a corporation that would bleed me dry if it would means some asshole CEO makes a few extra bucks in his annual comp.

> They are also a powerful driver for exploitation both of employees and of the general public.

Yes, but you'll always have that. An average person working for the government, be that as an employee or as an official, will optimize their work load and try to do the minimum amount required. That's individually much less of a problem than that greedy CEO you envision, but it adds up in large numbers and becomes a problem if not corrected - and there's no strong incentive to correct it when you play with the infinite money hack enabled.

Human nature has to be taken into account either way. It's just a lot easier when you acknowledge that it exists. Massively oversimplified: that's why the Soviets had to build walls to make it hard for their people to leave and murder those who tried. You can ignore human nature, but human nature won't ignore you.

> Yes, but you'll always have that. An average person working for the government, be that as an employee or as an official, will optimize their work load and try to do the minimum amount required.

Except that is not really my observation of someone that dealt with the public sector extensively in multiple different countries.

More often than not I dealt with people that were really trying to do a good job and were helpful to an extent.

Yes, there are lazy people that just want to coast (as if those don't exist in the private sector) and there is a level of corruption (also let's pretend that there's no corruption in the private sector). But that is definitely not the majority, especially in countries that more or less work.

> That's individually much less of a problem than that greedy CEO you envision, but it adds up in large numbers and becomes a problem if not corrected

Again, I disagree. The profit seeking and inherent greet of the any corporation creates a fundamental adversarial condition that is unsolvable. What is good for a corporation tends to almost always be bad for the general public. And there is no incentive to place constraints on the greed of corporations besides government regulations.

> Massively oversimplified: that's why the Soviets had to build walls to make it hard for their people to leave and murder those who tried. You can ignore human nature, but human nature won't ignore you.

You mention the Soviet Union as an example of a government that worked against the people, ignoring plenty of good examples in different countries.

And I am not really the one ignoring human nature when you are essentially willing to surrender the public good to relentless greed. Greed only begets more greed. You would do well to remember that

> You mention the Soviet Union as an example of a government that worked against the people, ignoring plenty of good examples in different countries.

No, that's not what I meant. I mentioned them because they are the largest experiment in having everything run by the state and ignoring human nature (or, in their case, thinking they could change it by pretending it didn't exist for 20 years). The outcome was people voting with their feet and leaving. And because that's terrible PR and they needed the people to stay, they had to build walls to keep them in.

But that's not because they were "working against the people", it's because their assumptions were deeply flawed.

> And I am not really the one ignoring human nature when you are essentially willing to surrender the public good to relentless greed.

What public good? You mean public services? Why would I pay amount X for garbage collection if someone comes up with a better system and can do it for half of that amount? Currency is a placeholder for resources, why wouldn't you choose the more resource-efficient way? Would it be "greedy" to replace inefficient ways?

It is also more efficient to refuse hospital care for those with serious medical conditions. Letting them die is probably more cost-effective.

I can come up with countless examples of how it is more cost-effective and innovative to exploit people for profit, but I am sure you already got my point.

I think here is where we will have a fundamental disagreement in world views, probably in a way that is impossible to reconcile. You think that profit-seeking can be a force that results in progress, whereas I think it is fundamentally adversarial to the public at large. Some government functions are simply incompatible with it, and elsewhere it needs to be curbed with proper regulation.

> It is also more efficient to refuse hospital care for those with serious medical conditions. Letting them die is probably more cost-effective.

No, it's not, that's a silly argument. We have hospitals not because we're such great moral people, but _because_ we've figured out that it's much better for society if an illness doesn't mean you have to roll the dice whether you survive.

But at some point, costs become an issue, I'm sure you see that as well, e.g. with an ageing population. It's not even a moral question, at some point you're arguing against the laws of physics. And you may think that human laws are hard to change, but wait until you've tried changing those.

> You think that profit-seeking can be a force that results in progress, whereas I think it is fundamentally adversarial to the public at large.

There's some schools of thinking where living in the West is "fundamentally adversarial" to the public at large and we better go back to pre-industrial life, traditional and simple because reject modernity and all that. I don't subscribe to that.

I don't think there's a way to deny that profit-seeking results in progress - the only question is whether you could achieve a similar level of progress without it. I believe history has shown that you cannot, and then it has re-run this experiment multiple times, and always ended up with the same result.

> I believe history has shown that you cannot, and then it has re-run this experiment multiple times, and always ended up with the same result.

You seem to think I am a communist simply for thinking that profit seeking should be regulated by the government and that government functions should not be in the hands of corporations.

I never once said that corporations should not exist, ot that all profit-seeking activity should be forbidden. You just presumed that, because you hold fairly extremes points of view.

The fact that you don't see how extreme your point of view is turns this conversation in an exercise in frustration. Oh well.

I did not assume that at all. It's just that the communists denied that greed (or, framed more nicely: self-interest) is a common human trait, so they set out to prove that it's much better without it. And the rest is, as they say, history. My opinion is that we don't need to try that again.

You appear to believe that profit-seeking cannot result in progress, and I disagree. Is that an extreme viewpoint? If you, too, consider self-interest "of the devil", capable only to destroy but not to create ("profit-seeking can [not] be a force that results in progress"), then I suppose it is an extreme viewpoint, much like the idea that the devil could be a force for good.

I just don't believe in the devil, or god, but I believe that you wanting to optimize the outcome for you in a game constrained by rules that require you to create value for others in order to receive value, will end up being much better at creating value than if there was no external motivation for you.