I agree that this is a problem, but I don't think it is that simple in practice. My personal observation moving from a blue state to a red state a few years ago is that the quality of the service I get from the state and local government is drastically better in the red state. I don't think I can read very much into that, since it's a minuscule sample size and every state and municipality is different. But it's striking to me how much nicer the employees are, how much better the services are, and how much less apathetic everyone seems to be, despite what I assume has to be lower pay.

I don't agree with the policies of most of the local elected officials where I live now, but that is more about bigger picture items. As far as day-to-day operation of the government, I can't say with a straight face that my old, deep blue, west coast community did things anywhere near as well as my new red home state.

Yes, I don't know what would work. I often like to bring up Japanese trains/subways which are privately owned and AFAIK the reason it works is because the train companies own buildings and land around their stations so they have a positive feedback loop, the more people ride their trains, the more their buildings get used, the more their land is worth, and visa versa. ~10 or so of the famous buildings in Shibuya are owned by the Tokyu Corp including the famous one with the giant screen, the 109 building (10 + To, 9 = Kyu), and the new 50+ story one directly over the station. The also own the building Google moved to. They own grocery stores at probably around 50% of the stations on their lines.

Other examples include any building you see named Atre (https://www.atre.co.jp/) which are shopping centers above JR train stations owned by JR.

I have no idea what the equivalent would be for government IT, nor am I saying all government services should be privatized. I do agree though that it's about incentives.

Even in Japan people complain about government construction projects where the incentive is always to spend all the money so near the end of the fiscal period a bunch of random unneeded projects start to make sure all the money is spent for fear that budgets might be lower the next year if they don't use all the money.

I don’t think it’s a contradiction. It’s a cogent and coherent philosophy.

Claim that government doesn’t work → defund it in the name of it being bad → government works even worse → repeat.

That isn't a contradiction. The philosophical position is that the government shouldn't be sucking good employees out of the private sector.

The strategy that follows is coherent and consistent - there won't be an attempt to hire great employees, the government won't have great employees and will be run appropriately for those realities.

The 'contradiction' only appears if you assume that secretly people believe that they can find good politicians and public servants even if their political opponents can't.

The actual "philosophy" is the privatization of government functions. Concepts like "libertarianism" and "government is inefficient" are constructed to push this agenda. In the US this force can be so destructive that it willingly starves the government to prove its inefficiency and pushes services to the private sector, which is oh-so-well-alligned with its incentives (healthcare, owning infrastructure and other natural monopolies).

If the Digital Corps can't get it done with people who can only make 25k a year, I guess we need some free market consultants for 200$/hour!

The real reason is that don't want to pay a lowly programmer more than a lofted manager and they have a stack of 15 managers on the project with the most junior one making 40k. Its a cultural thing within the government itself.