> The left starts out with a stronger bias toward the public sector in many of these areas. To which I say, prove the superior model! Demonstrate that the public sector can build better hospitals, better schools, better transportation, better cities, better housing. Stop trying to protect the old, the entrenched, the irrelevant; commit the public sector fully to the future. Milton Friedman once said the great public sector mistake is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. Instead of taking that as an insult, take it as a challenge — build new things and show the results!

Milton Friedman was talking about well-intentioned but counterproductive programs:

"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. We all know a famous road that is paved with good intentions. The people who go around talking about their soft heart — I share their — I admire them for the softness of their heart, but unfortunately, it very often extends to their head as well, because the fact is that the programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have."

That's not the primary problem the left has. The primary problem the left has is that 50% (if not more, but for the sake of argument, let's call the entire Democratic Party "left") of America wants to tear down all these policies and programs because they ideologically do not believe in the public sector, and that 50% takes power roughly every 4-8 years.

Let's say you want America to have a program like, I dunno, universal health care. It runs in many other countries and isn't generally seen as a wacko leftist bleeding-heart liberal SJW socialist conspiracy. You wait until there's a Democratic president and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress... and then the Democratic president goes and finds a right-wing policy, the individual mandate to buy health insurance from private companies, proposed by a right-wing think tank (the Heritage Foundation) and implemented by a right-wing governor (Mitt Romney), because he doesn't think anything short of that is politically feasible. It gets passed, narrowly. Then the very same right-wing think tank says it's an unconstitutional infringement of liberty, the very same right-wing politicians who were proposing it now say it's their job to vote against it, and 50% of the US dedicates its political aims towards overturning it, and it lasts barely five years before being overturned (as part of a bill to cut taxes, i.e., cut public sector funding, incidentally).

The public sector cannot build better hospitals, schools, transportation, cities, or housing than the private sector because the private sector can work on something for more than 4-8 years without being gutted.

> Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build?

A government where the left remains in power for more than two elections (or at least what the US calls "the left" - I'd genuinely love to see two parties, roughly the Bloomberg Democrats and the Bernie Democrats). But I don't know if 'pmarca really wants me and other like-minded folks to do the necessary work to get us there. The entity currently known as the US won't exist anymore, for instance.

Also, I can't imagine the right is happy about the status quo either - every 4-8 years, no matter how much they've reined in the growth of the public sector and cut funding for doomed programs, they lose control and someone taxes them to work on a brand new doomed program. Seems like they'd be happier with a consistently small and low-taxing government and could demonstrate the superiority of the private sector more easily that way.