Actual for-profit corporations generally don't want the responsibility and blame that comes with being a "real" government. And "for the people of our $Political_Entity!" tends to be a far better and cheaper rallying cry when there are grim choices and sacrifice at hand, or top-tier moral and political legitimacy is needed.
But when the corruption & cronyism get bad enough - the political sock puppets fronting for the greedy SoB's can start looking pretty thread-bare.
Ah. It seems an analogy wherein every angle raises a new question.
In that sense, "why not for-profit govt?" would seem to be a hypothetical which would indeed require much study to fully explore, let alone answer. I dare to speculate that some degree of research and debate may already exist in the field, with respect to the idea of privatisation of public services, and to certain 'free market' ideals as in neo-libertarianism, etc.
> What seems more obvious to me is that most people strongly dislike the idea of for-profit government. They actually greatly prefer autocrats who substantially serve personal ends!
They assume that just because they don't want a failed form of capitalism running their government that they must embrace autocrats.
They also assume that for-profit corps do things "better" and for "cheaper". This is flatly wrong and I can show it on my garbage bill. While I can't show it on my Internet bill due to former state law, I can also tell you that government-operated FTTH is significantly cheaper than for-profit companies running the same fiber based on a municipality that did get fiber in prior to enacting said state law.
What kind of wrong-think is this blog post? Can't we have people for people and not libertarians for $$$ and fuck-the-rest?
But when the corruption & cronyism get bad enough - the political sock puppets fronting for the greedy SoB's can start looking pretty thread-bare.