Making money for shareholders
You wanna know something else? The majority of the world economy is already centrally planned. Not on the national level, on the corporate level. Business is dominated by a relatively few giant corporations with internal economies the size of some nations. None of them run free markets internally. Sears experimented with it, to their demise. Central planning is already the primary way that our economic lives are driven. It’s just we let unaccountable billionaires do the planning instead of an elected body.
People’s Republic of Walmart, a very good book which goes into detail about how successful corporations use communist-styled organization and how we could have that for ourselves if we all decided to stop funneling all our hard worked dollars up billionaire noses.
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/
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!
Australia is a live example of the fact that they’re not. The state and federal governments have privatised a crap load of services and all they do is continue to hike our bills while providing less and less service. Electricity, water supply, employment services and more are now an absolute joke here.
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.
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.
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”
But government likes to starve the stuff they run to make it look bad so they can carve it up and sell it to their mates. See literally anything Britain privatised.
Anything with no competition trends towards being shit over time.
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).
Only someone who has never worked for a large corporation could hold the belief that corporations are efficient at making their product.
They’re very efficient at funneling money to their executives and owners though.
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.
Corruption is the issue when governments are involved with capital. Social inequality is the issue when private owners control the capital.
My view is that having an army and control over the capital is too many eggs in the same basket.
I mean, they are (at making profit), but funnily enough, you can’t run a society when everything is profit driven 🙄
That’s literally uncomparable. Government does things that ignore profit. That’s what government is for. The provide services at a loss. The only “profit” might be things like societal improvement, education, security, and such.
I think that’s exactly the point they’re making
“I made a meme depicting your claim with a mocking Spongebob, therefore your argument is invalid.”
It’s preaching to the choir but it’s not wrong.
This is something you really can’t say one way or the other.
I could cite examples of sick, failing government owned companies that did better under privatization, or simply shouldn’t have been governments owned in the first place. On the other hand, I could cite disastrous privatization efforts that should never have happened because they were vital services, or in the national interest. I lived through most of it in the UK when they were privatising stuff left right and centre - some succeeded, others didn’t.
And if they stay under the control of government then they need incentivization and means for measuring success. Success doesn’t just mean profit but it does mean value and quality of service. And in some ways that would require operating similar to if it were a private company.
In the end privatizing means maximizing for profits and not other quality factors though. It would be great if that would lead to increased value and quality of service, but that’s not the reality in our current form of capitalism. Here, it leads to saving costs whereever possible, which finally implies loss of quality.
When it comes to infrastructure like train networks, telecommunication lines or postal services and critical services like hospitals, privatizing is the worst you can do from my point of view. Living in Germany, I see plenty of such examples. Our train service got incredibly worse since it was privatized, hospitals have severe issues on multiple fronts, and let’s not forget how we are extremely sucking with the modernization and upkeep of our telecommunication infrastructure.
The government needs to take over things which are not viable for the private sector, but important for society to work.
Lets say privatisation of public transport: In countries where it is completely private, only major cities have reasonable connections. Because those are the most profitable ones. But if you want people to actually use public transport, you need to have a fine and widely spread net of connections. For that to happen either the state completely owns the public transport, or takes off financial pressure and only partially owns it.
Exactly this mechanism enables (partially) state owned organizations to run suboptimal. As explained in the example, this is a desired effect. But it also enables memes like the lazy state employee - which are at least partially true.
E scooter services are a nice example. They are not covered under state-run public transport. You see those in major cities. There, where they are not required as much due to more dense public transport systems. But there, where they would be really useful, in more rural areas, due to a much less dense public transport system, they are lacking. And why is that? Because profits.
