These aren't dumb people. They know exactly what they're asking for. Privacy and security of the public's data is not a priority to them, surveillance and power is. Politicians would much prefer all communication in plaintext, to hell with individual freedoms and privacy, especially European politicians that don't come from the same traditions of freedom as the anglophone countries.
What politician do you expect to openly confess the above in public. These are world-leading politicians, i.e., professional athletes of lying and obfuscation.
You live in a society where almost everyone goes to work to produce something that they will not directly consume.
Humans figured out a way to organise everyone and get them to work cooperatively, it's the free market.
In fact, it couldn't work any other way. Suppose you had 100% altruism and everyone wanted to promote the "greater good". You wouldn't ever know how to direct people towards that greater good. You need prices to drive production.
If Cuba were a free society instead of being run by communists they would have an economy that worked. This is the destruction caused by ~¾ of a century of central economic planning and Marxist ideology.
I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy.
English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.
LibreOffice is fine, but IMO the main appeal of Office is all of the collaborative tools: realtime collaboration on documents, SharePoint/document sharing, OneDrive, Teams integration, etc.
I always saw unions as a bureaucratic/political layer that sits on top of workers, collecting money without contributing.
I also don't think that people should all get the same pay or collectively bargain. Some people work harder, invest more in their skills, bring a better attitude, etc. They should get paid more.