EVERYTHING that the government does, it does inefficiently. The ONLY thing that government does MORE effectively than the private sector is to COMPELL people to do certain things. So essentially, the government is only good at doing things which people would NOT choose to do on their own. There are also things that have major spillover costs and benefits to society, where something that is known as a Free-rider problem would exist, whereby you have no incentive to pay for anything where you would otherwise derive free-rider benefits from them by NOT participating with your own budget. But even in THESE cases, Government has NOT shown that it can do the implementation. What it needs to do in these cases, is to outsource the implementation via COMPETITIVE bidding, but to FUND the contract. I believe that this could be done with just about ANY activity, including Road Building, and Law Enforcement. I Do believe that National DEFENSE, on domestic soil, is too big, and probably too immediate a task to effectively outsource. However, OFFENSIVE war, such as overthrowing Iraq, would certainly be the type of thing that could be more effectively out-sourced under contract. We could sell the rights to overthrow Iraq to Haliburton, their payment would be based on delivering results. They would have to pay their employees properly to compensate them to put their lives at risk, but their reward could be stock options, or Iraqi Oil options, for example.
So, essentially, the ONLY thing that government SHOULD do is collect taxes, create laws that compell behavior (such as the one making you pay taxes) and disburse the monies as determined through representative voting. EVERY other expenditure of the money should be a function of whether people (either directly or through chosen representatives) vote to make such a program governmentalized (meaning funded through tax levies and procured through bidding) rather than privatized.
People might choose to have Health Care federalized, because you might need it while unconscious or otherwise unable to make an informed procurement decision, or gain immediate access to emergency care. And, because it is an unpredictable risk pool, which many folks believe should be shared equally or otherwise fairly (based, say on risk premiums for smokers, or obese people, or drinkers, or etc.) Or, the public might vote to have this done privately, and join risk-sharing groups like HMOs, which they then pay for themselves. But still, we need to be conscious of the spillover costs for poor people who can't afford to join the HMO dying and rotting in the streets, which could spread disease to the rest of us.
In any case, ALL governmentalized programs should be funded through tax levies, by competitive bidding with a compliance review process. All other programs ought be private. And the only fair way to determine this is to have the public or the public's representatives vote on this. Which, BTW, is pretty much the system that we have now. The only problem is that not ENOUGH stuff is subject to competitive bidding and compliance review grading.
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