America's greatest leader just declared his candidacy...

[richardhutnik]

HappySqurriel said:

ManusJustus said:

Privitzing everything is bad, really bad.  A simple economic understanding of private vs public goods is all that is needed to avoid market failure:

http://www.economist.com/research/economics/alphabetic.cfm?letter=P&CFID=169185808&CFTOKEN=13970679#publicgoods

Even though 'privitzing everything' is a bad idea for the future, in the short term a large profit is made from selling.  Fundamentally its the same mentality of other types of politician who run up debt, no conern for the future in favor of short term gratification.  For instance, the mayor of my town privitized the public water supply; it was sold for millions of dollars so it helped the books at the time, but now the city has lot a major source of revenue and water prices increased 50% in the first two years.

The core question is how much of what most governments produce are "public goods" and how much is "social engineering" or "bureaucratic busywork"? From what I have seen most of what the government provides today is "social engineering" or "bureaucratic busywork", and even the "public goods" they do actually deliver tend to be full of "social engineering" and "bureaucratic busywork" ...

Privatization (often) eliminates these wasteful and pointless activities, but it is not (necessarily) the only way to do so. If there was the political will to do so, you could probably achieve similar results while keeping services publicly delivered; but this would require significant reform to the electoral system to prevent gains from being erased the second someone else came to power.

Wasteful things like pensions it seems.  As it is now, the concept of retirement is going to get abolished, as it will be impossible for anyone to retire.  All you do is unleash the market and the fallout happens.