> The benefits of co-operation mean the real trade-off is 1 million split five ways versus 100 to me. This was almost untrue in the age of conquest. It became barely true with industrialisation. It's massively true in the information age.

The problem here is that it's true of specific things, not specific epochs. If all the government did was collect 5% in taxes from everyone and use the money to prosecute murders and maintain bridges then the result would be a huge net positive. Meanwhile in reality the government takes billions of dollars from ordinary people and gives it to the likes of Lockheed, Oracle and Microsoft.

For the amount of money the US government pays Microsoft for Office subscriptions and the like, it could pay to have an office suite developed and released into the public domain many times over. Instead it uses the incumbent, in turn requiring others to do so in order to have formats compatible with the what the government uses. Who benefits from this other than Microsoft?