Which is beyond ironic to anyone who's worked in the corporate world, but I guess that's for another thread.
This idea they have that private enterprise naturally evolves toward the most efficient system is laughable.
>>This idea they have that private enterprise naturally evolves toward the most efficient system is laughable.
Work in private industry AND government and you might find the comparison a bit more apt, not that I'm a Republican.
Public sector can sometimes seem worse because there's less money sloshing round and people demand it isn't wasted, which effects a lot of bean counting.
We could collectively decide to eliminate a lot of red tape in government, no problem. It's just the effect of unchecked, unsupervised, unaccountable governments that make us want that red tape in the first place. Todays Justification Paperwork is yesterdays front-page scandal...
In fact I think I know of far more cases of private companies doing considerably worse job than what the public sector did.
My city recently switched to a private company for garbage collection e.g. It was an absolutely horrible mess. My home town had a care home for mentally ill people, that got taken over by a private company. They promised to run it cheaper than the government. Except they totally messed up everything. They lost a lot of talented people, who quit due to their poor management. Then they demanded to be paid more than the public solution had charged to do the same job.
So not only were they worse, they were also more expensive. Sure these are just anecdotes. But it puts a hole in the claim that the private sector is ALWAYS better. To disprove the notion of always you only need a single counter example.
I am not against private companies. Just let them compete on equal terms and prove that they can do the job better. Unfortunately our conservative government is often so ideologically tied to the idea of private always being better than they push for private sector solutions even when a company is not able to demonstrate that they do a better job.
In fact almost every case I've seen where a private company does the job cheaper, it is because they give their employees worse conditions and salaries, not because of smarter organization and management.
An entity that can rig the courts, the laws, and the regulations to its favor has an advantage.
Sure these are just anecdotes. But it puts a hole in the claim that the private sector is ALWAYS better.
Yeah, that's just magical thinking nonsense. You have to take the situation apart and look at what the incentives are. Economic libertarian woo is just as bad as alternative medicine woo. Markets aren't magic. They are a particular kind of distributed machine. It sounds like that mental hospital/home didn't have a competitive environment, or they couldn't have demanded more funding.
In fact almost every case I've seen where a private company does the job cheaper, it is because they give their employees worse conditions and salaries, not because of smarter organization and management.
In Washington state in the US, there were private DMV counters at Fred Meyer. AAA auto insurance can also do some of these functions. The customer experience is almost universally better at the private counters, because the private employees have incentives to make the customer experience pleasant, and the state employees have none. If a company can cheap out on its employees as compared to the state, and the level of service stays the same, then the market worked. If a company does that, and the level of service gets crappier, but the company doesn't face consequences, then the market has not worked. I bet, if you tried hard to prove the null hypothesis and looked for circumstances that would interfere with the market, you'd find them.
This is a straw-man, nobody claims that private enterprises are necessarily more efficient than government organisations. What is claimed, however, is that a free-market system invariably leads to better processes and products, compared to a government monopoly, because there is a competitive advantage in optimising overheads.
To suggest that government organisations are "often" or even "occasionally" more efficient than private organisations is quite chuckle-worthy.
