It’s a little bit more complicated than “Government bad!!” but if you can get one person to walk away from a discussion about this with the message “Business gives money to the government in order to get the government to give them more money so that they can give more money to the government so they will give more money to business…” and they start seeing it in their own lives - maybe it’s Tesla, maybe it’s Boeing, maybe it’s Lehman Brothers - then I think that will help inoculate that person against the lopsided narrative that the problem is just “too much government” or “government corruption” and so therefore the solution is hyper-capitalism.

Sure, you can see it. But there’s nothing you can really do about it at a national level.

At a more local level, we see that kind of graft, but the best any locality can really do is just “Say No!” to everything offered up by the municipal government. That doesn’t get you a healthy economy or a functional government, it just gets people finding elaborate back-doors for funneling money outside democratic institutions. Case in point, the Texas takeover of HISD after over a decade of failing to take it over and privatize it through well-financed conservatives running in local elections. Rather than deal with a bunch of intransigent locals who refuse to see their education system carved up and sold off, the state just seizes the entire school district and staffs it with industry flaks of the Governor’s choosing.