Australia is a live example of the fact that they’re not. The state and federal governments have privatised a crap load of services and all they do is continue to hike our bills while providing less and less service. Electricity, water supply, employment services and more are now an absolute joke here.
looks at ICBC, BC Hydro and BC Ferries.
Looks at how Canadian ISPs led the world in early internet technology then once privatized, ignored it and allowed Nortel to be infiltrated and shut down by CCP spies, allowing then to steal 5G technology.
Hell, in Vancouver you have the private Canada /RAV line, and the public Skytrain line. One was built in the 1980s and isn’t at capacity yet and the private one was finished in 2008 and is already over capacity.
Yeah there really is 0 comparison between public and private.
But government likes to starve the stuff they run to make it look bad so they can carve it up and sell it to their mates. See literally anything Britain privatised.
Anything with no competition trends towards being shit over time.
Honestly I was expecting more dogshit takes in the comments. Anyway everyone should read Elizabeth Anderson’s book “Private Government”
This is something you really can’t say one way or the other.
I could cite examples of sick, failing government owned companies that did better under privatization, or simply shouldn’t have been governments owned in the first place. On the other hand, I could cite disastrous privatization efforts that should never have happened because they were vital services, or in the national interest. I lived through most of it in the UK when they were privatising stuff left right and centre - some succeeded, others didn’t.
And if they stay under the control of government then they need incentivization and means for measuring success. Success doesn’t just mean profit but it does mean value and quality of service. And in some ways that would require operating similar to if it were a private company.
In the end privatizing means maximizing for profits and not other quality factors though. It would be great if that would lead to increased value and quality of service, but that’s not the reality in our current form of capitalism. Here, it leads to saving costs whereever possible, which finally implies loss of quality.
When it comes to infrastructure like train networks, telecommunication lines or postal services and critical services like hospitals, privatizing is the worst you can do from my point of view. Living in Germany, I see plenty of such examples. Our train service got incredibly worse since it was privatized, hospitals have severe issues on multiple fronts, and let’s not forget how we are extremely sucking with the modernization and upkeep of our telecommunication infrastructure.
People: “Government should be run like a business”
Government: “Speed enforcement is now done by a private business. You’re welcome.”
People: “They’re now trying to squeeze every less cent out of us with speed enforcement!”
Business: “Efficiency!”
Ugh, I hate the "Government should be run like a business” line. Take recessions. During a recession, businesses will typically engage in belt tightening. But government finances run on entirely different rules. They control the currency, central bank, unemployment insurance, deficit spending, and a number of other levers that can stabilize the economy. It’s the role of the government to step in and offset the business cycle. A lot of folks have very rose colored glasses of what life was like before the modern era’s governance of the economy.
R u talking about musk?
How dare u!
My government is mostly privatized. We even hired a consulting firm to figure out how the government could lower consulting fees. The consultants found that if we consult less, we will have lower consulting fees. We paid over half a million for that single report:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-federal-government-kpmg-consulting/
I think the issue is large organizations are inefficient and inflexible, be they government or corporates.
You want small lean groups with a lot of autonomy.
Our corporate structures and limited liability not only make these massive orgs possible, but incentivize some truly insane megacorps.
Yep, the US government used to break up monopolies and it greatly benefitted the boomers.
It’s not just that. You want businesses to be able to fail if they are being run poorly. That’s something that’s a lot harder with government agencies, state owned enterprises, and large companies.
- government agencies: People rely on them by design. You can’t simply shut down the health care or welfare system because it’s being run poorly or corruptly.
- state owned enterprises: There is pressure from the ruling class to keep even inefficiently run or corrupt SOE going because they provide jobs and patronage.
- large companies: They become systemically important. The loss of a single large business can cascade through the economy. See: Lehman Brothers or the big auto companies during the 2008 crash.
You should see the companies in charge of the mexican government.
Depends on the situation I’d say.
Typically this is something I hear more commonly within businesses.
Unsurprisingly the business thinks business is the most efficient way to run anything.
But surely you must admit that they do extract more wealth from the working classes for people who just move money around. Let’s see your profit-less crown corporation do that. Checkmate /s
Since companies usually have an autocratic structure, i guess they are.
Note: more efficient doesn’t mean better for the people or better at all. It just means that they skip a few important steps.
People forget that ‘efficient’ in a capitalist sense means that all resources are used. So when you privatize security, prisons, public transport, etc. guess what happens: those companies try to extract as much value as possible and do as little as possible. Because that is what capitalist efficiency is.
A private company is absolutely more efficient than a government. The boss simply says “this is what we’re doing” and that’s it – it’s just a question of what goal they’re efficiently pursuing.
The problem is that intelligent, empathetic, and selfless people rarely rise to those positions. The few that do usually get pushed out of business by ruthless assholes.
I dont think that private corps with tens of thousands of employees can do that at all. Private companies also have committees and working groups and different departments that dont talk to each other (despite the committees), and policies that people follow even though the policy hasnt been good for years.
The boss says “this is what we’re doing” and then it takes years for those hundreds of departments and tens of thousands of people to do it. Or they dont do it, because they disagree with the boss and the boss is far away from any work that they have no idea if people are doing it or not. Or they sorta do it, but then a new boss comes in and has a different plan.
Despite the dictatorship of the owner in a private corporation, actually implementing a thing, especially a new thing, does take a lot of time.
The entire capitalism system relies on the capitalists being honest. The problem is that most of them are not.
Exactly. The libertarian talking point that the market and private entities self-regulate because consumers “vote with their wallets” is nonsense. If people are misinformed or not informed at all, then people don’t have any choice at all in what is supposedly a free market! As I mentioned in another comment, we know many companies do not disclose what they put into their food products, and this is in spite of regulations also still existing! The Tesco supermarket chain in UK turned out their beef meat has horse meat and none were the wiser until it’s too late!
One agitprop I always bring up is that “capitalism is built on informed consent” to make people realize that the system is broken, because even the most ardent supporter of the system realizes that there’s very little informed and VERY little consent in what the system has become.
Now that i don’t believe, they’ll argue till they are blue in the face that you are completely consenting effect someone has a gun in your face.
All it takes for that to become undone is when they get signed up for a subscription they never wanted.
