Government spends because you demand the services they provide. If you are unhappy with those services please list those services that you personally will be happy to do without. And while you are contemplating which government agencies you can live without please consider the downside to life without said agency. For example, no FDA and drug companies can do whatever they want with the drugs your aging parents take. Consider the company behind the Extenze ads. Now think of them as the industry model.
Because I demand it. Wow. Do you think in the absence of an FDA that people would start taking drugs that would kill them. (I don't know Jebediah, mah' ma keeled near completely over when she downed that bottle of AZT the chiropracter prescribed for her corns.). or that there wouldn't be private agencies that would step up and do drug analysis, and since they had an economic incentive to maximize the cost/benefit of drugs, that this would not be done better, and in a much more cost effective way.
Let's do a little mind experiment. Perhaps we can have a government agency that approves code -- after all, bad code can endanger lives, and almost any line of code anywhere can be a source of danger -- and we can all submit our code to the government before it is production ready.
Do you think such a system would improve the quality of code?
"We don't like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99," Murdoch said. "They pay us the wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge," he said. "But I think it really devalues books, and it hurts all the retailers of the hardcover books."
So the other day I messaged another admin from the console using the regular old 'write' command (as I've been doing for over 10 years). To my surprise he didn't know how to respond back to me (he had to call me on the phone) and had never even known you could do that. That got me thinking that there's probably lots of things like that, and likely things I've never heard of. What sorts of things do you take for granted as a natural part of Unix that other people are surprised at?
Any program which runs right is obsolete.