We don’t. We do not have an industrialized economy anymore. GDP used to be a reasonable measure of goods and real services. Now the majority of GDP is financial services: accounting based on fictitious production, capital gains, leveraged buyouts, premiums, and buybacks. The great difference between the US economy and the competing economies in Russia, China, India, and Brazil, is that these other countries kept a steady course toward developing an industrialized economy. The US is a zombie economy, wherein more than half of the S+P companies flaunt paper gains. This serves a small minority of US citizens at the expense of the vast majority of laborers.

When the government does something, there is no profit margin built into the cost. When a project is privatized using the largely contrived argument of “efficiency,” contractors neglect to remind consumers that they plan to skim off 20+% in profits. The very nature of privatization is to add a middle man between public funds and public services. Of course there are inefficiencies in any government, but there is a systematic increase in the cost of public services when a profit must be extracted by an intermediary.