Our Institutions Suffer From A Lack Of Owners

 A good way to analyze an institution is to think about what it was like (or what it would be like) when it was owned by one person.  Of course, you can do this with other things, like ice cream.  Families and small businesses made ice cream with real ingredients- it took large corporations to come up with gums, fillers, questionable oil, etc...

Libraries, schools, hospitals, governments- all our institutions suffer with similar issues.  When these institutions were private and owned/funded by individuals or families, those owners required a certain level of quality and scope that kept the institution functioning as it was intended, through time.

Unfortunately, the bureaucracy does none of these things.  A bureaucrat has access to the resources of the institution as long as he is there, so he won't think very much further than his retirement.  Indeed, many of these 'professionals' can make their CVs look good at the expense of the institution, in the hopes of moving on to some other unsuspecting institution.  The multimillion dollar project the director presided over may look wonderful on paper when he goes on to interview at another place, but it's really a tragic mistake the institution will have to suffer from for years.

The owner has a longer time preference- one focused on the original purpose of the institution, and then creating the conditions through which the institution can continue to persist through time.  This is actually one of the key aspects of leadership, but instead of teaching this, they'll teach garbage ultimately designed to favor cheap charisma and/or demagoguery.  We are taught to think that the characteristics of an exploiter are leadership.  They try to make us fear and suspect anyone who does display real leadership capability.  

We arrive at a point where a product like healthcare is just as adulterated and bad for you as some soy-based soft serve they want to foist off on you as ice cream.  It's just not what it was.  Hospitals used to have enough beds to weather something like COVID- now they don't and the primary reason is that the resources used to keep those beds available are now going to a gigantic bureaucracy we never needed.  In Canada, it has gotten even worse- they are pushing euthanasia on people.  It has become more convenient to kill patients rather than treat patients.  

'We the people' largely fails, especially if it is expressed as any sort of ownership strategy.