Conservatives can answer it. The federal government doesn't generate income.
Income is not generated at a single source. It depends on an effective partnership between government and the private sector - like during the Cold War, when the 80s consumer electronic boom flowed from the Space Program and Pentagon budgets. Or what about the Hoover Dam? - which enables much of the Southwest to exist in the first place,
so that it can have economic activity in the first place? If you look at the infrastructure necessary to commerce, as well as the R&D successfully funded by government which has driven technological advances, and the research contributions of the great government funded public universities, you will realize that your comment requires more nuance.
There has never been a separate private sector without government regulations. Do you understand the legal infrastructure it takes to manage 1 billion global financial transactions ...all happening at once... requiring layers upon layers of laws & rules to incentivize participation and render commerce predictable and safe enough to transpire in the first place? Do you understand the regulatory complexities that go into just one futures market? The notion of a completely free market is incoherent.
(Have you ever read the exact paragraph where Adam Smith mentions the invisible hand. In that paragraph, Smith speaks about the dangers that happen when business moves capital, investment, and jobs outside of the host nation. That is, he preaches against the hyper globalization that corporations foisted on the nation with Reagan, and which continued rapidly under Clinton. Most of the GOP base has not read the Wealth of Nations, so they don't even know the sacred text which governs them. Smith would roll over in his grave if he saw the GOP's neoliberalism, which had no legal or moral obligation to the nation or people)
(Movement Conservatism has created a generations of morons)
Here is where your comment comes from. It doesn't come from your desire to lie or be simplistic. You are repeating something felt in your bones. Indeed, it feels more true than the pull of gravity. Your comment comes from the fact that corporations -- starting in the 70s - captured the Republican party [... FYI: the democrats were not yet captured by capital; they were beholden to labor].
Regardless, starting in the 70s, the GOP created a machine which converted business profits into political outcomes (lobbying) and opinions (think tanks and popular media). As a result you have been taught that everything government does is socialism, and everything corporations do it freedom.
Here is the problem: you have been tricked into aping a moronic simplification. Let me explain: these two poles that you believe are separate - government & private sector - have
never been separate; they have always partnered to create wealth. Boeing and commercial aviation grew out of government funding. The computer and internet were heavily dependent on the Pentagon's research and budget.
Let me repeat my young son: Government & private sector are part of the same machine. In the world's most shining example of capitalism - The United State of America - business and government have NEVER been, nor will they ever be, nor could they ever be separate.
My young child: capital doesn't want independence from Big Brother- god no, never - it craves Washington's wallet and power. The private sector has always sought the centralizing power of Washington. Why do you think Reagan and Bush grew government so much. K Street wasn't an incidental component of the 1994 congressional revolution, it was the final realization of the marriage between private profit and government power - so companies like Eli Lilly could capture Medicare spending, and Halliburton could turn war into an industry. Capitalism didn't resist the special interest state, nope, it
invented special interest government so that it could raise profits. (my young, young talk radio son)
Adam Smith's unregulated invisible hand is what happens when drug companies quietly send doctors on junkets so that they will push certain high margin drugs; or when the FDA is bribed to suppress the toxicity of a certain food product; or when the owners of capital give "donations" to politicians so that the government has to pay above market rates for drugs - or pass policies which award contracts designed to funnel tax money into criminally inflated no-bid contracts. [all of which satisfies the goal of capitalism: to boost profits] The point of profit has always been to capture the centralizing power of government in order to gain access to the taxpayer's wallet and the markets which the taxpayer depends uopn. Why? Because capturing government's power to award contracts and fix markets satisfies the essential goal of capital: more profit. Capitalism
uses government to give one group of people (owners/share holders) special interest monopolies over the rest of the population. This is why government crushes foreign and generic drug competition on behalf of Eli Lilly. This is why every giant corporation has lobbying offices in Washington - so it can suck at the big welfare teat of government contracts and regulatory favors. So that is can mold regulations in order to capture and lockdown markets. Government power is essential to the monopolization of the American economy - without it, large corporations would never be able to craft the perfect regulatory environment. Again: what do you think lobbying is for. Capital LOVES government. -can't exist without it. Turn off talk radio friend, it has simplified your brain.
BUT YES, The government doesn't partner to create wealth any more; rather, it partners with the private sector to transfer more of it to the class which has captured it. The old American government which created the Hoover Dam, defeated the Nazis, lead technological research and built the interstate system... is dead. The American government has been fully captured by the private sector, which wields its centralizing power in order to chain Americans to health insurance and energy monopolies. Do you know how and why the first electric car movement was crushed? [Answer: capital captured Washington and tied America more deeply to the middle east and oil shocks, which oil shocks destroy one group of Americans so that another may profit even more] Who do you think funds all elections and staffs government? The corporations in your portfolio who have captured Washington and turned it into a special interest state.
The rightwing loves to complain about government, but there is no government. All you need to do is look at lobbying money and campaign funding to realize that government is gone. Talk of socialism is absurd when the private sector owns and staffs government.
You need to help. You have to broaden your information sources.
