Government Services, the Private Sector and the Unification of Government and Corporate Power.

Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed that the Government was the problem, not the solution, and went on to systematically dismantle it. Yet the functions of Government don't magically disappear by diktat. He passed the federal hiring freeze and suddenly the Federal Government didn't have the people necessary to carry out the programs and obligations set out by existing and new laws. His solution? Let the private sector handle it. But why was the Federal Government doing what it was doing in the first place? If the Free Market had been working as we are told by the corporate propaganda machine, Private Enterprise would have solved the issues in question.

So he let the private sector tackle these unmet needs, with (surprise, surprise!) federal funding. This had several unintended consequences:

The Federal Budget kept increasing to satisfy the demands put on the Federal Government by the courts and politicians at all levels, pushed by corporate lobbyists.
The money outflow to the federal contractors kept increasing the deficit.
The Federal Government lost its expertise, now residing in the contractors, that can then raise prices like monopolies, essentially being on corporate welfare. The Federal Government is funding obscene profits and outlandish executive pay.
The workings of the contractors are opaque, leading to corruption because the federal safeguards don't apply.
The knowledge generated by research contracts doesn't transfer to the Federal Government and therefore the People and the Common Good.
Black box products and services lead to security issues, like the recent massive hack. Trade secrets by their very nature are no more than security through obscurity.

Solving these issues is remarkably simple:

Pass a law to repeal the hiring freeze and hire directly all the people currently working on federal contracts.

At the stroke of a presidential pen, all the people working on federal contracts now work for the Federal Government, subject to all safeguards and checks and balances. All the expertise now resides within the Government. The obscene profits that are not much more than corporate welfare disappear. [1]

This also automatically solves the black box effect. In particular, since all software is now developed in-house, the source code is fully available for inspection. If, furthermore, it is made Open Source and available to the public, as it should be given the provenance of the funding, so that millions of eyes can study it, the likelihood of exploits vastly diminishes. Additionally, if bounties are offered for the discovery and/or patching of vulnerabilities, in a transparent way, the security of the code base would increase dramatically very quickly.

Is this a nationalization? No. The intellectual property funded by the taxpayer properly belongs in the public domain. Any property rights to intellectual property developed and funded by the private sector needs to be addressed and compensated for, if it's directly related and necessary to the Government contracts. But given the speed of technological advances, it is likely that in quite a short time, the intellectual property owned by the private sector would become obsolete and irrelevant.

Does this mean that the private sector is nationalized? Not at all. The private sector is still free to keep doing what it's doing, without Government funds, and sell whatever products or services it does sell, competitively, to any level of government. The contracts just need to be structured in such a way that no black box products or services can be sold to the taxpayer [2], thus making the Government dependent on the contractor in question. This is not much different, in principle, than the drug dealer keeping the users addicted.

Keeping users locked in is also anti-competitive behavior. This applies not only to government contracts/products but to any product sold by monopolistic big tech [3]. Thankfully, the Right to Repair movement is gaining ground. [4]

It is also important to keep corporate power separate and distant from Government power, or we end up with fascism:

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Benito Mussolini

To that end, the revolving door between corporations and Government needs to be closed. Since the expertise now resides within Government, there is no more need for corporate experts.

Additionally, the incentive for corporate lobbying disappears, since there is no longer profit in government contracts.

A likely objection from the National Security Establishment which, not surprisingly, matches the "security through obscurity/trade secrets" corporate view, no doubt would be;

Our most sensitive tools can't be divulged!
Why give potential bad actors an advantage by providing them with the most advanced tools and/or a road map to vulnerabilities in existing code or procedures?

Given how certain actors (most likely Russia) have caught the U.S. with its pants down recently, the people that matter in this respect most likely already have even more sophisticated tools. This most recent attack proves that the current model of security through obscurity and compartmentalization of knowledge in contractor silos doesn't work.

It also shouldn't matter who has access to those tools. The sophisticated attackers most likely already have them. If the Government does an adequate job of protecting against these attacks, it shouldn't matter who is attacking. It only takes one successful attack, by the most sophisticated bad actor.

The Open/Transparent Approach guarantees that more people are aware of details of tools and possible attacks, thus ensuring that the infrastructure is better protected. It will also put an end to the underground markets that trade in hacking tools and information [5], similar to drug legalization putting an end to the underground drug economy [6]

[1] Ownership of facilities and equipment is also an issue but can be resolved by proper compensation.

[2] An additional law, explicitly outlawing proprietary products/services and guaranteeing access to all aspects of the technology in question is probably required.

[3] How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow

[4] The Right to Repair New York Times article.

[5] If everything is out in the open, ensuring wide analysis and the legality of all information and tools, no one would have an incentive to pay for and/or profit from such "products".

[6] Assuming of course that legalization is not replaced with a system of legal cartels, as it appears is happening now, after the legalization referenda. The governments are just trying to redirect the huge profits of the drug cartels to their own legally-created cartels via barriers to entry and taxation.