> In in ideal world, a government should stick to regal functions: externals security (army), internal security (police), justice (enforcement of laws, property and contracts). End of story.
OK, so you want a 19th century government. That's a position that one can hold, but (unfortunately or fortunately) this is never gonna get voted for, so unless you're also against democratic voting, you should probably think about how to accomplish some of your goals in a society that actually can exist today.
> And when that's all said and done, cut every department budget equally by 50% the first year.
OK great, how do you choose who lives and dies? Cos that's basically what a 50% cut across the board will mean. Personally, I like that people without as much money as me don't starve to death on the side of the street, but obviously opinions differ.
> In an honest retirement system, you should mostly rely on what you have set aside during your work life, 401k style.
OK great, so your proposition is that poor old people should just die?
> And certainly not pray that there will be, 50 years down the road enough of the same suckers you are now to pay for your sustenance. When people stop making babies, guess who's going to be left holding the bag? You. That's who.
This is basically all developed world social security systems, so you're proposing again, that poor old people should starve to death on the side of the street.
More likely, what will actually happen here is that the voters (most of whom are poor) will vote themselves confiscatory taxes on people who have saved. And that's the better option! The worse one is that they'll just bring back the guillotine.
Note: I apologise for the potential emotionalisation of your points, but it's important to keep people aware of all the consequences of approaches like this.
While I definitely think that lots and lots of state problems exist, and could be fixed, I reckon that in many cases fixing these problems will require insourcing a bunch of work to the public sector. Good examples of where this would probably work are in constructing tendering and design, as well as software tendering and esign.
> But if we're talking impressions, my observation after a rather long life is the exact opposite: the private sector is far, far more efficient than governments except when corporations get to monopoly status and essentially become mini-governments (via crony capitalism) and with the exact same illnesses.
Having spent a bunch of my career in public sector orgs and the rest in the private sector all I can say is that they're about equally inefficient and stupid, just in different ways.
> I'd love to see the data backing this claim.
I'd love to see data backing your claims of the stupendous waste in government, but we can't always get what we want, I suppose.