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@ObiWayneKenobi said:Oh wait, because the government doesn't like the free market. Capitalist pigs.
The free market only works when there is no such thing as a big company.
Once there is at least one big company, the free market necessarily favors that big company under the invalid assumption that it has proven its worth in the free market. If the company had, in fact, started from the same place as everyone else and reached this size in the free market... that would be precisely how things ought to work. But it didn't. It's almost certainly big because it's been unfairly favored by conditions in the current market.
The only way to correct this is to take away everybody's money so nobody has anything. Then you can have a free market, but everyone hates you. What the US has done instead is to make a massive body of regulations designed to guarantee that small companies don't automatically get slaughtered in the marketplace. Some of those small companies have leveraged a knowledge of those regulations and made themselves into big companies, largely by exploiting loopholes and technicalities in the complex interactions of those regulations.
The real racket, incidentally, is deliberately doing a shitty job because that's all you can do for the price you quoted - but still technically meeting your requirements, so you can exploit the preferential treatment you get as the original contractor. If it would cost $10 million to do the job right, offer to do it for $5 million, and spend $2 million doing a half-arsed job that technically fulfills the contract but doesn't actually work. Then you can bid another $5 million to fix it, and repeat ad nauseam. Since you can fix it for much less than it would cost someone else to do it right, you'll always get the contract, and you can essentially charge the government $3 million a year for nothing as long as you want. When you get tired of this contract (i.e. you want to bid on a $100 million contract at $75 million and only spend $5 million developing your intentional failure), close the loop and ship it.
If you're honest, you use projects like that to subsidise other projects that actually make a difference - you bid $500 million on a $700 million contract over ten years, and so long as you bring in $20 million a year from other sources, you can keep going. Government purchasing agents notice this and will not only look the other way, but deliberately farm vague contracts in your direction so you can charge more and deliver less. Likewise, if you're dishonest and just milk the government for cash, the contracts tend to dry up unless you know how to fly under the radar. (Changing company names, sale of the scam company to a larger honest company, proxy CEO appointments, public displays of discipline, etc. The process is well-known in the right circles.)
Done right, e.g. Cheney and Halliburton, you can get rich AND make a difference. Whether it's the right difference is always debatable, but I'm sure he'd be more than happy to discuss it with you... say, on a hunting trip. ;)