"The navy has multiple problems here, including inefficient ship builders who have resisted all attempts at reform. Then there are the problems within the navy that prevent effective design of new ships and efficient supervision of the construction. There is also an inability to agree on what designs are needed and how many of them, with the result being ships with something for everyone and that no one can afford."

 

The one thing that government is supposed to be able to do - the one job the private sector is not supposed to do - is the "breaking things and killing people" job.  The management of retaliatory lethal force in defense of the U.S. Constitution.

 

And yet we see, year after year, that the politicians and the bureaucrats can't do a decently cost-effective job of building, maintaining, and operating a Navy. 

 

And these prostitutes, megalomaniacs, and power-grabbing mother bastids are supposed to run our whole economy, regulating every activity, supervising our every decision, telling us what to produce, how to handle our resources, how our children are supposed to be educated, even what we're allowed to eat. 

 

Nanny Bloomberg ring a bell?

 

What we have here is yet another instance of what sane, honest economists call "the knowledge problem," specifically referring to the fact that the people who have the authority and the responsibility - chiefly the politicians, who get their jobs by winning popularity contests - simply haven't got the fund of knowledge (or the native intellectual capacity) to make the decisions they usurp from those of us who do.  

 

In building and operating a Navy, and in running a nation, they not only fail (spectacularly!) but they prevent everybody else from succeeding.