state choice

I've often heard, and desperately believe, that companies can enact stunning turnarounds when they focus on their core competencies and only those. Are you a clothing superstore? awesome. Please don't let your IT dept. convince you it needs to build an office productivity sweet from scratch. Those dudes are not pulling you in a good direction.

This is a fairly common refrain and I was wondering how you would apply it to governments. Governments are historically very good at amassing powers and getting into wars. Also incredibly important things like providing and ensuring a stable environment for private individuals to conduct business. This includes shepherding the environment and enforcing contracts. But there are many things they do which I think they are terrible at: running companies is the first one. This is a partial thought that is interesting, don't remember when it went into drafts, out it comes!