Big government is bad enough, but the real threat to freedom now is big business. Without cutting that down to size and putting it under the control of ordinary people -the peole who work there, and the people who use what it makes, (if it makes anything, which can't be assumed these days), rolling back the state just gives a better killing field for the predators all around us.

There are other choices as well as having a big centralised bureaucracy on the one hand or a capitalist conspiracy against the public on the other. Cooperative federations can do anything that government or big business can do, and do it better. And with the new technology we've got now, the computers and the phones and so forth, that is more true than it has ever been.

"Making a profit" does not just mean covering your costs and paying a decent wage to everyone in the firm, including the people who are paid to manage it. That would be fair and juast. It means making as much as you can when the opportunity arises, regardless of what that does to other people - and it also means holding down the wages of the people working for you to the lowest level that is in keeping with the market. (And in some case that means lots of dosh, in others very little indeed.) Whether you call that greed or not doesn't matter. But it is essentially a form of theft.

As for the assumption that a publicly funded system of health care means waste - that's just not true. The British National Health Service isn't perfect, largely because of interference by the last givernment over 18 years, but the cost of the bureaucracy and administration is far lower than in equivalent private health services. (And the logic of that isn't to take the health service out of the public sector, it's to take the government out of the health service, but keep it public.)