Badge, I'm all for concerted private action to augment the government, but the government has to provide certain services. Private road building, policing, utility management, food regulation, stock regulation, etc., aren't reasonable solutions.
What you're suggesting sounds an awful lot like unwinding the American social safety net, so no more Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc. Respectfully, we don't live in an agrarian society. In the modern world, all of those things are a necessity in one way or another--unless you want to live in Somalia, which really isn't a modern society.
You're right that government intervention will never perfectly fit every situation, but that's true of any intervention, even the enforcement of criminal laws, but the government has proven much more efficient, and frankly necessary, for many of these tasks.
The government should stay out of a lot of things, but removing social programs seems to me to be a fools errand.
To me, the key isn't doing away with government intervention, it's matching up government intervention with private investment, even at the welfare level. Again, to my means testing point, if someone has to invest something of their own, even if its a relatively small amount, they will value what they get more than if it is free. Free has lots of problems.
Even things like the HUD program that you seem to be so opposed to aren't necessarily bad because they have had some bad impacts. Yes, redlining was overtly racist and the government bears responsibility for that. Nonetheless, a great deal of private wealth was built in this country because of HUD intervention (if anything, redlining limited that growth by denying it to certain classes of people, working contrary to the economic goals of the program). It didn't make people millionaires, but it did help establish a healthy middle class. From a Keynesian perspective, that government intervention strengthened private wealth and made for stronger, more self sufficient citizens.
This concept that Reagan championed, fear of, "I'm the government and I'm here to help," is overblown. Realistically, at a local level, if you were to remove the family services departments, health departments (including mental health), the utilities, public works, parks, education, (I presume you wouldn't advocate privatizing policing and fire services), you would create havoc, and not one where benevolent wealthy people would step in to save everyone else. World history simply doesn't make that a realistic goal.
However, tying government assistance to some kind of investment from the person/people being assisted, seems like a good idea, because it will increase the private ownership of the outcome.
To my mind, the tax code requires a fair amount of reworking because right now it values wealth over work, i.e., the wealthier you are, the more opportunity you have to increase your wealth simply by being wealthy, and pay lower taxes on that increase in wealth than working stiffs pay on showing up to do their job every day. That's perverse. But those incentives aren't without reason--some of those reasons are valid ones. So this isn't an easy, "just simplify the tax code" issue. Incentives matter, and the government has to weigh those incentives. Taxing and spending are the government's primary way to do so.
You're reading me wrong here my friend. I will say this though. Private developers build roads and streets and parks all the time, and turn them over to government or utility companies upon acceptance of the improvements.
The key things municipalities provide must stay. Police, Fire, Public Works. I would be in favor of dumping things like DCFS, because they are prime examples of government failure.
That can be privatized. So can housing.
Social Security and Medicare stay.
Higher education funding could be accomplished using the model that I helped make happen at Harper College in Palatine. We need people getting degrees or certificates that make them useful. One doesn't have to go to Northwestern to get a useful degree - one which provides the opportunity to earn a living wage. The entire higher education ideal is broken in this country. We don't need art history majors. We need manufacturing degrees.
K-12 is also a mess. There are too many districts and too many administrators - all sucking the taxpayer tit. Someone else (not me) needs to fix that from top to bottom. I would proposed eliminating a cabinet position, to start.
What I'm talking about is having private contractor make improvements, so that businesses are attracted to come, and builders are attracted to build. I (and others like me) would donate my time to design the projects. I've worked on many private land assemblage projects. It would need to be done block by block. In places like Detroit, that's not hard. The land is dirt cheap (literally).
