Yeah - the answer is that the cost to deliver a service from my local government is a lot cheaper than it is when it's coming from the private sector.

People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.

In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.

So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.