America desperately needs to go in this direction.

Step one, eradicating for profit prisons.

This single idea was the worst thing that ever happened to our legal system, imo. It created billion dollar companies who's product is incarceration. Like any for profit company, they minimize their costs by warehousing people in illegally crowded cells as cheaply as possible with little or no treatments or support during or afterwards and maximize their business by lobbying for ever more incarceration. The prison guard union is the best funded lobbying group in Washington, and created minimum sentencing so every convict becomes a customer.

Make prison a government function again, who's goal is turning out functional citizens, not warehousing as many bodies as they can get paid for, and we might turn a corner.....but that won't ever happen, there's no multi billion dollar prison reform lobbying group to bribe senators into doing the right thing.

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Frankly, it was insane to go down that road in the first place, but Americans have had it drilled into their heads millions of times that the free market is always more efficient than government.

That statement is 100% true, while being completely misleading.

Incandescent light bulbs are extremely efficient... at producing heat instead of light.

Private enterprise is very efficient at creating short-term profits for their shareholders.

Yet Americans seem to think it'll somehow save tons of money so they don't have to pay their precious taxes and everyone can go out and individually buy services for 10x the price they'd pay through the government.

Classic example is GM buying up public transit in the 30s-50s and bulldozing the facilities so everyone has to buy a car. Great for GM, terrible for everyone and everything else (including, ironically, GM in the long run).