| Marks said: Well I, for one, agree with privatizing everything. The only roles of government should be national defence and protecting us from others (police/courts), everything else can be done much more efficiently and cost effectively if privatized. |
Corporations are very bad at providing services with natural monopolies.
- You can only realistically run one water pipe to a house
- You can only realistically run one set of trains
- You can only realistically have one primary (elementary) school for a given area, otherwise young children will have school travel times of >1/2 an hour
How this is usually done for the first two is a N-year contract is awarded, and then (and I have hundreds of back issues of UK's Private Eye with evidence) they can charge what they want with no fear of business dropping, and never invest in infrastructure because they're looking for a gain within N years.
You can have lots of regulatory oversight to counteract this but honestly the corporate profit margin + large regulatory bodies + very badly written contracts because civil servants don't care about how much the government spends on procuring something so they get a bad deal is less efficient than a state owned service.
Knowing some /things/ about the defence industry as I do (adding up to, well, hundreds of millions in wasted tax money), NOTHING is less efficient than public bodies contracting private companies. Even a completely private system monopoly is better.
