The Water Is Not Running Most people agree that government is generally less efficient than private enterprise, but it is little realized that the difference goes far beyond efficiency. For one thing, there is a crucial difference in attitude toward the consumer. Private business firms are constantly courting the consumer, always eager to increase the sales of their products. So insistent is that courtship that business advertising is often criticized by liberal aesthetes and intellectuals as strident and unmannerly. But government, unlike private enterprise, is not in the business of seeking profits or trying to avoid losses.
Governments are invariably at war with their consumers.
This contempt and hostility toward consumers reaches its apogee in socialist states, where government's power is at its maximum. But a similar attitude appears in areas of government activity in all countries. Until a few decades ago, for example, water supplies to consumers in the United States were furnished by private companies. These were almost all socialized over time, so that government has come to monopolize water services. But, recently, in a climate that is not conspicuously dry, a water shortage has reappeared every few years.