The waste of human potential is staggering. The purpose of the economy should be to enable making full use of it. Instead we focus on profit.
Simple example: The real, measurable costs of pollution - illness, polluted drinking water, etc - are externalized and so companies doing said polluting are "profitable." Would they still be profitable if those costs were not externalized? I suspect not.
Similarly I suspect there are externalities not being accounted for, for self-interested reasons on the parts of those collecting the profit, when assessing which types of work are profitable or not.
And we should subsidize vocational training to a greater extent so that students aren't forced to take on financially crippling loans.
The biggest issue with your proposal is that if those employees paid by the government to do these jobs are paid less than the private sector, you'll put the private sector out of business. If they're paid the same or better, you would need strong incentives to make them go find a different job instead of keeping a market rate job that is assured to never go away.
I would propose that the temporary government employees be paid minimum wage. This isn't intended to be permanent.
There's quite a few jobs for which the government rightfully has a monopoly. I certainly wouldn't want the fire/police forces to be private. We had that and saw the problems it created. Same goes for the military. I'm not aware of an example of a private IRS or judicial system at a national level but I can't possibly see that going well either.
So yes it's a matter of degree but I disagree with you strongly on where to draw the line.
There’s no credit given for having a tidy business with steady profit. Instead you have to have “growth” and other this-quarter-must-be-better-than-last-quarter-or-else crap that “investors” want.
Small businesses are often able to get credit in the form of bank loans once they have established a track record of profitability.
You are in a tech bubble. Absurd profitability is not required elsewhere.
Please define what "making full use of it" means, without referring to profit.
Because without that definition your sentence doesn't actually say anything.
The only way to become an owner of a company is by being an employee. Essentially, all companies become co-ops. Investment of capital would happen through long-term relationships with banks, not through selling pieces of the company off to creeps who want outrageous returns at the expense of the employees/customers.
Instead of short-term gains, people now focus on 10, 20, and 50-year plans. Employees can democratically elect their leadership (or any other internal system can be set up).
The stock market and public ownership in general seems like an incredible waste of resources and focus.
What US currently lacks is the entrepreneurs who would come up with new products and services and then employe the unemployed, old people etc. But given the restrictions on immigration of highly skilled individual this is going to be tough to achieve.
The problem with the second half of your comment is its multiple applications of the magic dirt theory, in that somehow there exists a magic dirt in some countries that grows great entrepreneurs who are also magically forbidden from success in their own lands, yet supposedly magic dirt in other countries produces the opposite effect of people who cannot create business while in the conditions for great success. And somehow the solution to this magic soil fertilization issue is to take a solution that works for 1 person, such as moving around the world, and scaling it by 7.6 Billion to move the entire world population to Silicon Valley. The exact biochemistry is also mysterious, in that moving people around is implied to be a perm fix, although its more likely that moving people from "where X is broken" to "where Y is broken" will merely result in a larger quantity of "where Y is broken" people after a short amount of time, essentially re-enacting the slave trade to harvest a perpetual supply of human capital. Or maybe its a weird varient of old fashioned imperial era colonies complete with mercantilism. Move all the unemployed orange growers from Florida to Alaska, the only economic result will be a larger number of unemployed orange growers in Alaska rather than FL. Likewise there is no number of experienced profitable Maine fishing boat captains adequate to import and create a lobster fishing boom in Nevada, South Dakota, or Wyoming. Problems that don't scale have to be solved at the root of the problem, rather than brute force. On an individual basis, of course its nice when immigrating entrepreneurs work out, but for a variety of reasons it's not a scalable or long term solution to the very large scale overall economic problem.
That pretty much describes most of humanity, resource extraction to landfill with a brief stop off in our living rooms.