Got to pick up Dresdener's comment about all government departments being inefficient and perhaps corrupt.

I have worked in many organisations, government and private and I have found Mobil and Coles Myer to be the most inefficient and Health Insurance Commission the most efficient. HIC is one of the few organisations that have installed computer systems on time and on budget. Notable computer stuff ups include Westpac, Mandata. So no I can't see any reason to sell Medibank Private to the for-profit sector.

I think efficiency directly relates to accountability and rigid heirarchical organisations with plenty of money are more concerneed with internal politics than customer service.

A country the size of Australia with a population of 20 million can efficiently run a single health insurance system, a single superannuation system. The duplication of administrations for super funds is wasteful and having worked for the super funds I found their administrators were not investment wizards. Sadly the average person is going to get badly burned by our super hodge podge and it won't bite until they are elderly and perhaps sick or frail.

I am not sure that the heads of corporations are worthy of their obscene salaries, yes they should be paid more that the lowest worker but multiples more than the prime minister. NO - and don't increase the prime minister's salary.

"Doesn’t it strike everyone as strange, that the current end result of free market capitalism is that precious few apes have ended up cornering a disproportionately large share of the jungle? If we let this game continue on its trajectory, do we really want to end up with a situation where a single ape owns 99.999% of all the world’s wealth?"

No ape owns a "large share of the jungle". They just made more jungle than others.

Wealth creation is not zero-sum. In other words, for one person to gain wealth, another does not have to lose it. In fact, an increase in one person's wealth usually adds to the wealth of others.

"And so the Bible says the "Anti-Christ" will reveal himself".

A Non-believer. Your master!

"Doesn’t it strike everyone as strange, that the current end result of free market capitalism is that precious few apes have ended up cornering a disproportionately large share of the jungle? If we let this game continue on its trajectory, do we really want to end up with a situation where a single ape owns 99.999% of all the world’s wealth?"

GT beat me to the point. As he says: “Wealth creation is not zero-sum.”
Compare capitalist free market countries to controlled economy ones. What was West Germany to East Germany, South and North Korea, Taiwan and Cuba. The wealth obvious from the higher GDPs in all the former countries has not been stolen but created.

Also W.T.G.G.W., how have you travelled in life such that you come to the point of asking the question, apparently without shame: “is it wise to allow one person to maintain for themself such vast stretches of the sum total?”
Apparently if there is a practical justification, you have no qualms in expropriating a significant proportion of a person’s honestly acquired possessions.
What’s next? Sydney is becoming too crowded, so we will choose a million of its less productive residents and forcibly move them out bush somewhere.
Approximately fifty people die each year waiting for organ donations that never come, so from now on we will randomly pick healthy looking people off the street, strap them down to operating tables and “donate” an organ they can spare to those wanting.