Imagine what would happen if the government gave a single corporation a monopoly on building and maintaining all government buildings. Would that seem inappropriate to you? Would you think that the corporation, lets call it Big Corp would price their buildings competitively? No I don't think they would either.

I could imagine that if Big Corp had no competition that they would charge as much as they could get away with. Since Big Corp would want to make sure that they had a continual money stream from their business would it not make sense that Big Corp would encourage the government to keep expanding the numbers of buildings they had. Or if they ran into resistance, maybe Big Corp would convince the government that they needed to perform major renovations to their existing buildings.

Now image that Big Corp took a percentage of their profits and used it to finance the campaigns of elected officials. Would that seem like a conflict of interest to you? I would imagine that Big Corp would probably spend a lot of money to promote "friendly" politicians. You know, the ones that would vote to expand the government building and renovation programs. In other words, Big Corp would be paying politicians to vote for more spending that would directly benefit BigCorp.

Do you think that Big Corp would suggest building and renovation programs that truly benefited the general public? Or would it be more likely that Big Corp would be mostly interested in keeping up their income stream? Now I am sure that some of those buildings may be helpful to the public but that certainly would not be the primary goal. Now imagine that Big Corp grew so much that they had several employees in every major city. Not only would Big Corp have a monopoly ongovernment contracts; they would have tremendous influence with politicians through campaign financing, and sympathy of the general public due to their large payroll.

Wouldn't such a monopoly seem inappropriate? Wouldn't it seem like there was a conflict of interest? Wouldn't such an arrangement be susceptible to abuse and corruption? Would anyone think that it is a good idea to give a private corporation so much power over the government?

That is exactly the type of situation that we have in government today with the government employee unions.

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