In this case, the private sector did not provide a more efficient, cost-effective solution to the problem.

After all that time denying the 47% comments were what he believed, Mitt Romney revealed after the election that what he didn't believe was what he sad about not believing what he said about the 47%. He says the President bought the electorate with its own money.

Romney might have made better use of all the billionaire swag taking the same approach, rather than leaving it to Karl Rove and his ilk to make it vanish into thin air (RCA chair David Sarnoff once remarked that "finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it disappears."). A little back of an envelop calculation finds that assuming Romney and his backers had a billion dollar cash kitty, and it took 61.6 million votes to win, well, Romney could have spent $16.22 on a gift for enough voters to be tearing up the South Lawn for a dressage track.