cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/33395211
* provided you have decently well functioning public service, and it’s not a country with high levels of corruption.
I hold the belief that things being equal there is almost no situation in which privatisation of public services has ever been a positive for the average person.
However, I’m keen to hear arguments, examples or studies where privatisation has gone well [1], and has been a net positive to society, and could not have been performed by the government.
I don’t believe there are such examples, and I believe (with too many real world examples to list) that privatisation always leads to enshittification and budget blow outs eventually because private companies exist to maximise profits.
This community (!aussocialism@aussie.zone) does not delete comments that disagree with socialism, so you’re very much encouraged to share your views respectfully.
[1] for countries that have some level of democracy at that point in history i.e. I’m not really interested in the example of China becoming capitalist, 1. because Chinese “socialism” was never control of society by the workers, and was (and still is) a top-down hierarchical dictatorship - which had a ruling class determined by party position, and now also determined by wealth. No wonder that things were being run so poorly before they decided to be capitalist. Dictatorships don’t usually breed very good conditions for sensible management. 2. They still have most core government services being administered by government departments.
Utopia for me, Dystopia for you!
It all depends from which perspective you are viewing the “system” from.
Privatisation has been a great success story for many!
That is why narrative has replaced reality!
It should always have been much, much more difficult for sitting governments to sell off public assets.
The Japanese rail system is private and really fucking good. I don’t think it’s necessarily unachievable through a public system though.
Yeah, perhaps I should have added the caveat that I think privatisation is worse than having it be publicly run.
Instead of the rail companies making bank from all that transit oriented development sales, could have been the people.
I don’t think you’re going to get any debate about this here. I think we should be working to nationalise as many services and assets as possible. But I think we should be offering billionaires the choice of keep ~$300M and your head, or lose the lot.
I think we should just take it, and maybe there head as well regardless.
It makes no sense that anyone opposed to public institutions can be elected to manage public institutions or be employed by them.
It’s always good…
…for someone else’s wallet.
The best example I can think of isn’t entirely private. VicTrack / Metro trains is a good split. A private company (Metro) runs the service, while the state government (VicTrack) owns the assets. Metro don’t get to set the price.
Kinda like NBNCo owning the infra while private companies do the retail side. I believe water and electricity operate under a similar model.
…but WTF is with toll roads? They can burn in hell.
What do we actually get from having a private company run the service though (in the case of Metro Trains), instead of just employing everyone directly?
What exactly do we get by having private companies do the retail side of the NBN? Instead of just having the NBN provide the service at cost (which they’re already doing, and it’s just being sold on to us by private companies who repackage the bandwidth and usage in different ways). Same logic for gas and electricity (in Victoria, not all states do this). What are we actually getting by having it repackaged and sold on to us with a markup?
Seems to me were unnecessarily paying an extra margin to account for profit. We could just employ those permanent workers directly.
Water (in Victoria) corporations are actually government-owned corporatised water authorities. Which again makes no sense and we get nothing from having them being administered separately.
Here’s an interesting video on the initial privatisation of the metropolitan trains and trams under Kennett, which was an absolute disaster: https://youtube.com/watch?v=34fGlurh42A
Brightline.
EDIT: Missed the “provided you have decently well functioning public service, and it’s not a country with high levels of corruption”.
I’ll still award you points for this one. At least someone is providing public transport. So many US governments are so poorly managed, it seems to me.
Though, I still believe if they could have it be publically run, without being knee-capped like they do with Amtrak, it would be better for society, and people’s wallets, overall.
