Maybe it's just the fact that I'm a DC native that I react this way, but what exactly are you talking about? The federal government does a fine job at a great many things with low overhead, lest you'd be getting all your mail via FedEx. I recall during the big health care debate, there was the statistic going around that the overhead of medicare was 2%, vs. somewhere around 30% for private insurance. (What those people spend on advertising alone could pay all of that "bureaucracy".)

Readers of this site should be keenly aware of these issues and what they're really about; we work in an industry with rampant age discrimination where people are encouraged to spend their early 20s working all night to make someone else rich, people routinely burn out before 30 ... do you expect to be pulling all-nighters at your Rails startup at 70? No? Then you should pay attention and get pissed off about this stuff.