Government is meant, above all, to be of beneficence to the general public, of which part of its duties is for the aid of and the creation of the necessary infrastructure that we so often take for granted, such as roads, electricity, schooling, waste management, water, and so forth. This is why utilities that serve the population are not only regulated by the government, but are structured in a way that ensures the primary purpose of these utilities is to provide the necessary service to the people at a fair price with a high degree of reliability and good service.
While there may be a lot of good reasons of why private enterprise structured for profit and the government should team up, the problem with such a combination is that often the government foregoes its task of regulating private enterprise and becomes more of permitting private enterprise to do what it feels it has to do, essentially unimpeded by robust governmental oversight. In other words, private enterprise has a strong tendency to take driving control of what it has been authorized to do, with the basic attitude that the government should just take a back seat and let the enterprise lead the way in what it believes is the correct course, and therefore for the government to serve the sole purpose of just legitimizing whatever actions and activities subsequently occur. Further to the point, in any construct in which private enterprise is for all practical purposes, the sole source of what is has been contracted to do by the government, then there is, for example, a strong tendency for private enterprise to pad their expenses, so that it might seem as if they are only making a modest profit, when they are actually making out like bandits.
So too, whenever private enterprise and the government combine together to address the general needs of the public, in which that government no longer seems to serve the purpose of monitoring private enterprise, but rather seems to be co-opted by private enterprise, then nobody neutral is minding the store, but rather the people are thus supposed to just trust that private enterprise in conjunction with the government are doing the right thing, when they may well be taking advantage of the public’s credulity. Additionally, the structure of government is to set the rules and standards that all must follow, and to impose fines or injunctions against those companies that have not followed those rules, and therefore, when the government has teamed up with private enterprise, we find that this check and balance, so necessary, is no longer fully in play.
After all, it has to be remembered that private enterprise is driven by its lust for profit as well as for an increase in revenue, year by year, of which, the government’s job is to see that in capitalism that there is fair competition, a level playing field, and that the general public is provided with the required information to fairly evaluate where they should consider spending their money, and when those choices are constricted to that which provides them no recourse with their government, because that government has teamed up with private enterprise, then the general public has effectively been cheated.