Many small businesses do just fine on very low profit margins, filling niches that businesses with large overheads can't handle. You see niche businesses like this everywhere, filling very small needs and doing it well. I think you would be astonished at the solutions that would appear for education if the system were freed up. Heck, there are a lot of solutions appearing now in spite of everything.

A good rule of thumb: If an activity loses money forever, and you're not getting good results, you're probably doing something stupid or useless in the first place. Private business is self-limiting in this regard. Government isn't.

Also: in the realm of public works, plenty of poor people want running water and sewage treatment plants and, oh, rural electrification, but either they can't afford to band together to get infrastructure investment money or the private sector doesn't think it's worthwhile to serve such a small, spread-out population. So who steps in?

I don't know. The guys with the guns, I suppose. The better, wiser people who know what the customers want, know what the best answers are, and know everything about all the technologies available. The ones who impose solutions, good or bad.

Oh, yeah. Centralized authority always comes up with the best way to do things. Look at all the great examples through history and across the planet. There is a bone-deep belief in some people that some things are just too damned important to be left to individual choice. A lot proceeds from this. And of course, if you take choice out of it, force comes into it.

My grandparents used a septic tank until they died. It was a mature and well-designed system, and it worked. Running water came from a well, and was piped to normal modern plumbing in the house. This kind of thing works best for isolated areas, but then it's the isolated areas that can't band together to fund infrastructure. To be fair, I'm sure the electricity was subsidized.

Maybe if politicians hadn't decided that the Answer to power in rural areas was running wires everywhere at taxpayer expense, workable decentralized power solutions might be all over the country by now.

Maybe if politicians hadn't decided that they should subsidize roads while making trains pay for their own rails we might have a more balanced transportation system. Or flying cars.

Maybe if the Corps of Engineers and other massive government programs to reshape the planet hadn't been as available, people would be living above flood lines, and learning ways to work with the environment on a local scale.

Maybe if energy hadn't been subsidized for years, we might be looking at better and more efficient ways of doing things.

Have you noticed we have phones without telephone wires now?

That we mail letters over the internet? Ben Franklin didn't see that coming.

Maybe there are workable alternatives to forced solutions. I have a lot of confidence in human ingeniuity.

But for sure a committee of elected law school graduates sitting in Washington isn't the best group of people to solve difficult technical and economic problems like you are talking about.

Liberals crap themselves at the slightest hint that the state can tell them what to do with their bodies, their behavior, or anything of the sort. But someone's job, business, or economic activity? Anything goes.

But it's kind of a moot point. Human creativity is so powerful, it finds alternatives even when the government doesn't think there should be any. Look at the Post Office. I'd like to think cell phones would have showed up even if the Ma Bell monopoly was still being enforced. Maybe especially because of it. Same for education and other needs. Like I said, private business can still compete when the government isn't doing a very good job.