Government or public sector spending and management might be inefficient from time to time, but so is private sector, add to that, more importantly it's not anywhere near as reckless as private sector management imo. Which puts profits ahead of stability, infrastructure and morals. We give the government(s) (around the world) grief about the economic climate, but the truth is the largest part of the blame lies less with government and more with private corporations, banks and fat cats that essentially let greed fuel their reckless gambling and corruption, that was often with our money and at the expense of global economics.
Well again, I wasn't talking about management. No, the government doesn't "take risks" but you're comparing apples to oranges. The government isn't meant to take risks, where as private companies cannot make profit if they do not take risks. Now, you might think that the risks they take are too big, but that's a different issue.
My response is basically twofold: 1) As I've explained over the course of several posts, the public spending I'm talking about is when the government spends money that it'd otherwise not have spent (even if it generates a reason to) in order to boost the economy. Is this risky? Well, it's hard to be risky when you're not trying to make money. What's our definition of risky based upon, if not on the chances of losing your money? And since the government is never really hoping to recoup its money in this sense (building some nuclear submarines in Scotland will, whilst creating jobs, never "recoup" - they're submarines for the Royal Navy, not stereos for the market) so the comparison doesn't work. My whole point was that the way that government spends money is damaging because it has all kinds of negative effects on the market, and the market will almost always use resources more efficiently in this context. If it sounds like I'm making bold statements, it's because I've written, over the past few pages here, pretty significant chunks of texts on exactly why I think this occurs, and whilst you're entirely free to disagree with me, it doesn't appear that you are - it just seems like you're attesting to a contrary view without explaining why you think I'm wrong (very probably because you haven't read the posts, don't worry, I'm not singling you out, it's just that you happen to be responding to me right now!)
Secondly, I'd say that the "global crisis" arose for a few different reasons, but a lot of the blame is directly laid at the feet of governments. When banks were giving out cheaper loans than they should have, in some cases (such as the US sub prime mortgage crisis) that was a direct response to government legislation under Clinton telling them to do so. Likewise, the world over this was able to occur because we have all have fiat currencies that mean the government can set a central interest rate (even if it's technically delegated to a central bank). That's not a problem of a lack of regulation. A lack of regulation is when someone legally gets hold of a gun and goes round shooting people. This was more akin to the government active loading and giving a gun to the banks and telling them to go wild. There's a reason why Greece, Spain and Ireland's property booms occured immediately after they joined the Euro - because their single currency collateralised the interest rate with that of their more fiscally sound northern neighbours and their interests rates were slashed overnight. This lead to a huge boom (that was ultimately not founded on any actual growth, thus the problems they have now) and it was all entirely thanks to the way that governments set up their central banks. If there was no central bank lending money to private banks (or if the interest rates were simply more higher), they banks literally wouldn't have been able to do a huge chunk of what they did. I'm not saying the banks aren't also to blame (thanks to rehypothecation on the shadow banking system they were able to dangerously leverage credit far beyond deposits even without central banks help in some cases) but there's a big difference between a government failing to regulate against something, and a government actively aiding the behaviour we saw.
Also, people should stop comparing the NHS to the US system. I don't know a single person of any political colours who holds the US system up as an example to follow. It's got the worst of both worlds in terms of private and public. It's a sham of a system, and the NHS being more efficient than it is about as note worthy as my carbon-fibre, 8-speed lithium-ion single-mould dildo being more effective than my chocolate one. That's not to take anything away from the NHS, but it's other ones, like France, Singapore etc, which successfully meld public and private investment that we should be looking to for inspiration for reform, not sitting idly back, patting outselves on the back because we have a system that's better than the awful one in the US.
