Businesses used to be owned and run by businessmen, the capitalists, entrepreneurs and hommes d'affaires you have so much admiration for. But increasingly, businesses are now collectively owned (there's that word again) and they are run by mere employees, professional managers, who have little choice but to carry out their instructions IN SERVICE to their firms. They do not set policy, they execute policy set by faceless accountants and distant financiers in an abstract world of money and numbers that does not even know we exist.

Really?

I once asked someone to name all the evil corporations in America that have engaged in the sort of abuses you consider endemic. He started to sweat a bit when he got past five.

From this website:

Small firms:

• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
• Employ about half of all private sector employees.
• Pay more than 45 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade.
• Create more than half of nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
• Supplied 22.8 percent of the total value of federal prime contracts in FY 2006.
• Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer workers).
• Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
• Made up 97 percent of all identified exporters and produced 28.6 percent of the known export value in FY 2004.
• Small innovative firms produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms, and their patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.

If I cared to do the work, I could add the category of those large businesses still owned and run by the persons or families that founded them. You can probably think of a few yourself, especially if you're running a computer.

Again, I'm curious to know where you soaked up all this stuff you rant about. Some of the phrasing is almost right out of the pamphlets. It's obvious you've never really looked at the facts of the matter.

gbaikie made an excellent point below, in that government's organization IS in fact run along the worst lines of what you describe for the private sector. In fact, in many areas it pretty much occupies the right side of the bell curve in mindless bureaucratic short-range thinking. And yet so many people think the government ought to be running so much more of our lives than they already do.

Think about that for a while. I have.