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/
Next step: hire a consultant to figure out how to consult less.
Government consultant here. The federal government does nothing if it is not military related or medical care in the Department of Veterans Affairs. Everything they produce is done via contract. That includes leadership which is queued up using consulting. Sure, they make the decisions but that’s not management or the visionary leadership people think it is. It’s all contract management.
I remember in college we took a course on economic efficiency and the short takeaway is “the free market is extremely efficient, but only when the competing parties start with equal resources. the more inequal the starting position, the less efficient the market becomes.” and to my mind that suggests that we should enforce some sort of “rubber-banding” effect so that a company needs to keep competing or else it will “drift” back to the mean over time. Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y’know? Capitalism but with safety guards would be pretty cool.
Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y’know?
This is why aggressive estate taxes are so incredibly critical. People shouldn’t be professional descendants. And of course welfare provides both ladder and safety net. The fools who are trying to abolish one or both are working against social mobility.
Because they think social mobility is wrong and bad for society
There is a reason why the European/Scandinavian economic model works so well.
Give it 10 or 20 years and we’ll basically be the US, but with really high taxes
You gived 10 years 7 times in a row
Yeah, mixed economy undeniably works!
Afraid to say this but that college course was capitalist propaganda. When you look at the actual facts it points to capitalism being trash in every metric except cancer-like growth for the sake of cancer-like growth, which of course it’s good at because that’s what it was designed for.
I think just don’t allow other companies to buy others. Mergers should be illegal.
Anyone who worked in both private and public would know both are not more efficient than the other.
Public services are chronically underfunded because of corruption. Private companies perform rabbit in a hat trick by making you guess what undisclosed ingredients they put in your food if they’re not regulated, just so to save cost and make money for themselves!
If these last few years have taught us anything.
They are putting undisclosed ingredients into the food even if they are regulated.
Slim Jim - now flavored with microplastics and preserved with forever chemicals
Slim Jim’s were the original forever chemicals. You ever seen one go bad?
Making money for shareholders
They’re efficient at maximizing profits for shareholders, usually at the dire expense of literally everyone else.
Ya know what was a foundational part of the American dream? Pensions. Ya know which employers still offer them? Counties, states and the federal government.
Private companies exist solely to make the people at the top very rich based on the stolen value of employee labor while dumping catastrophic losses in the public sphere. That’s capitalism in a nutshell.
You’d have to be unbelievably gullible, naive, traumatized AND brainwashed to be a diehard for a system like that. But, somehow they’ve managed it. A deluded nation of Amway top performers just one move away from making their own imaginary millions. All simping for the system.
Yesterday an American accidentally admitted that they tip their landlord. It was at that point I said to myself “man you fuckers deserve to suffer under whatever republican you end up voting for next election because we all know that’s what you dumb ass motherfuckers are going to do”
I’m a big proponent of letting people suffer for their bullshit, but please let the rest of us out
Telecommunications Act. 1996. The Great Brainwashing where the Party began telling you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears.
The best part? …if you endorse force and shick therespy to fix this fucking shit even the “leftists” will call you a violent fascist. Everyone got brainwashed.
Possibly, but they have different incentives.
Private companies literally paid billions of dollar to dismantle a (more or less) effective government just so that they could say this (and its still wrong).
In my (Australian) public service career I have watched a team of 100 public servants deliver and keep updated a data capture and processing system
A large American service company now does that job with four times the people. It took years to get them to add keyboard shortcuts to their product - the original was entirely mouse driven; and their product didn’t meet contrast rules for months
can you call a government that allows itself to be turned into a caricature of itself efficient?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s any service where the service provider has the customer over a barrel.
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
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.
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.
That’s a survivorship bias. Running a small group is easier, of course, than a large organization (though I’m not sure how much this get offset by the large organization having more resources and the advantage of size), but I suspect there is something else going on there. When there are small groups, there can be many small groups, and the inefficient ones can die leaving only the successful efficient ones. Large organizations are too often “too big to fail”.
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.
Depends on the situation I’d say.
More efficient at what though?
Offshoring profit
Getting money into the pockets of the responsible ones
Of course it’s feddit de. We need instance blocking but for comments.
Ok what is the problem with my comment?
Neither is obviously more efficient than the other overall, it depends on the structure and the incentives. People worry about private prisons for example. If you make it so the government sends people to prisons and you pay the prison a fixed rate per prisoner, of course you’re gonna get skimping on services by the prisons. If you instead give the prisoner a voucher for a prison and make them pick where they go and prisons get money per voucher they get from prisoners, you’re gonna get competition on quality so you’ll get high quality prisons. Opposite outcomes with just a change to incentives.
My biggest worry about private prisons is that it incentives making more things illegal, longer sentences, disregard for recidivism rates, etc. There have already been cases of judges taking kickbacks from private detention facilities to hand out longer sentences. I guess this is a case of private companies corrupting government though. Government contracting stuff out to private companies is probably the worst of both worlds.
You don’t need private prisons for that. 90% of prisons are government run, and police unions have been lobbying for decades to keep shit illegal.
That is a completely legitimate concern. It’s important to note that even if prisons are publicly run, there’s still a bunch of private actors in the prison system in the form of the people who work in it. Prison worker unions and police unions lobby for more laws already to protect their jobs. Private prisons might make that aspect worse, but it’s not like it’s perfect now.
