No. We can do better. We did better for decades and decades before we started populating the east coast with casinos.

Does the police commissioner of Philadelphia require the same level of support as the president?

If governments didn't provide grants, you'd have a massive, massive expansion of the state and far less policy and operating flexibility. We need to think about where government itself should be a service provider, and where the government should simply fund a service (a difficult line to draw), but it's not feasible for the government to never hire or pay non profits or other service providers.