It's always boggled me that people put stock in government acting "better" than private citizens. We see the President, and congress, etc, flying about in private jets, enjoying health care perks, and making deals with corporations that secure their wealth and power while doing a half-assed job on the occasional project or plan that they campaigned on.
This is my non-partisan critique of all government, not just "those people". Both parties are guilty, and both get re-elected because they've locked down the process where we nominate new candidates.
Completely agree with you there. Government is made by people, and they are going to act just as selfishly as anyone else if you let them. Just take this story, from a year ago:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/congress-insider-trading-problem/608488/
But that's why we supposedly have a system of checks and balances in place. And if the system has stopped working as it should, then we need to adapt it so it works more efficiently again. If politicians are doing a "half-assed job", it's the public's responsibility to properly motivate them - for example, by reducing their possibilities to connect every decision they make to them making some sort of extra salary. That's what the democratic system is literally designed for.
But isn't that the root of the problem? "The Government" or "The Company" is treated like a person without having the accountability of a person. No, the government didn't decide on something - the *people* elected or appointed or hired into that government made the decision. Likewise, a corporation didn't make a decision, the C-suite or board of directors made a decision or set a policy.
The collective *we* need to stop blaming nameless, faceless entities and start holding accountable the people shielded by their association with those entities. Name names. Fire people. Try and convict people. Make it so that corrupt people will no longer see government "service" as a viable career. Make it so that sociopaths are weeded out from positions of authority in publicly-held corporations. It would help to have term limits for elected officials and it would help if interlocking corporate directorships were unlawful.
The "company as a person" problem is overstated, and mostly a distraction. In some ways, a company is legally treated as a person. But only in a very narrow fashion, for specific reasons.
And how exactly would you choose which individuals to hold responsible? Large bureaucracies, including governments and corporations, are systems designed to widely distribute responsibility. Some things can be pinned on specific people, but many other things are the result of systems in place that create certain outcomes, and it's not clear who created the systems, and even if it were they're often long gone anyway. The CEO and C-suite can set direction to a certain degree, but have to deal with a lot of inertia and can't just redesign the system from scratch. This is even more true in the federal government, which is morass of overlapping responsibilities created by accretion over centuries that allows blame to be shifted around like quicksilver in a beaker.
(And I say that as a person who believes we should throw a lot more executives, and many, many, many more government officials, in jail. But it's not a solution to the underlying problems.)
It's even harder to blame the voters, because any political system that's created will immediately attract the busybodies and other people who think they should have a say over what their neighbors are doing, and they'll immediately start tweaking the system to ensure they remain in power. They'll spend their entire lives doing this, making the system as opaque and murky as possible to disguise what they're doing. Conversely, the general public make poor watchdogs, because the improvements they can make in their own lives by learning all they can about the different candidates will be marginal, but require a vast expenditure of effort, thus leading them to the rational conclusion that it's in their best interest to throw up their hands and do nothing. It's not about "letting" the cronies and crooks in power get away with anything; it's that there seems to be no way to stop them, and all the sound and fury aimed in that direction amounts to nothing.
These are all systemic problems, not personal problems. We can't fix the problem that corrupt people will be attracted to loci of political or managerial power, so the solution isn't just better people or a magically more attentive public. No, the real solutions have to be systemic. In this case, limit the appeal of government to the power hungry. Circumscribe their powers, by hard limits and massive decentralization. If there's less power in one place, worming yourself into power provides less benefit; and having to lobby 50 or 70,000 different governments for corporate favors is a lot harder than lobbying just 1. Replace arbitrary discretion and fudging with clear rules that are applied consistently. If your job is just applying rules with little leeway allowed, then you can't benefit by granting boons to your friends or further employers.
These would be hard changes to make. It will require taking on the seemingly overwhelming number of people who screech when a single redundant program is threatened with excision, and the even larger number of moral busybodies who think they should be able to tell everyone else what to do. And even harder, it would require converting many of them. That's education, and the mission of a generation or two, not a quick fix.