Maybe you should run for office if you think you can do better....
I'm very grateful for the service the post office offers. Sure you have to wait in line once in a while but I can send letters and parcels anywhere in the country and abroad for little money, which is something I do place a certain value on. The biggest problem I have with the postal service is that it's become mostly a taxpayer-funded distribution system for junk mail, but doing something about that would be too much government intervention, am I right?
SS is going broke but in 2000 we had a budget surplus that could have been used to address this, but bush decided tax cuts were a better idea and we all got checks in the mail, yay! There are plenty of seniors and people on disability for whom SS is the only safety net. But your right, we should get right of SS and let them all invest their money with lehman bros instead.
Actually Fannie and Freddie were doing a good job of making home-ownership accessible to lower-income families with little cost to the taxpayer until we decided it was ok to start bundling and reselling mortgages, which almost killed our financial system.
Medicare is projected to go broke by 2017 if we don't do anything, but that has more to do with the demographics of the baby boomers than some inherent flaw in the system. Seniors love it and even republicans are defending it to score cheap political points in teh healthcare debate, which makes me think it's been more of a success than anything else.
And the fact that our dependance on foreign oil has gone up to do more with our increased consumption of energy has gone up dramatically and we that we are only just starting to look at energy conservation and alternative sources as ways of reducing our dependance on imported fossil fuels. Obviously if our use of energy goes up and we don't look for domestic alternatives to importing oil, more of our energy will need to be imported.
You could also give some better examples. The interstate highway system, which is also a 'big government' project seemed to work rather well last time I used it. The defense department is one government agency that seems fairly competent to me...
It's a bit ironic that these 'failures of government' are mostly the result of republican mismanagement. It makes sense though: fuck everything the government does up while your in office, then tell people that government - rather than your own stupid decisions - is the problem when you're in the opposition. By the time the next election rolls around, enough people will have forgotten that you were the one who fucked it up in the first place to get your reelected.
Obviously all this stuff costs money and needs to be funded through taxes. But next time you send a letter, drive on the highway, need a fire in your house extinguished, have to be rescued at sea or face a foreign invasion, ask yourself whether you really want those services to be provided by the private sector...
