Looking forward to 2016

Posted Jan 12, 2016 1:10 UTC (Tue) by raof (subscriber, #57409)
In reply to: Looking forward to 2016 by robbe
Parent article: Looking forward to 2016

I also have a hard time imagining a government stating that they do /anything/ better than private businesses. Even Cuba or China can no longer be relied upon to take this view. It’s just sooo 20th century.

I must have missed the part where the armed forces, roads, police forces, fire departments, public libraries, and so on were privatised.

There are tons of things that governments do better than private businesses. There are even more things that private businesses only do effectively when they're regulated so heavily as to approximate being an arm of the government (sewage, water, power distribution, telecommunications, and so on).

There are certainly things that governments are bad at. But private basically business doesn't exist without fundamental government services, and is vastly less efficient without many other functions of government.

Looking forward to 2016

Posted Jan 19, 2016 13:45 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

Note that the GP did not say that they have a hard time imagining a government doing something better than private business, but they have a hard time imagining a government *saying so*.

Over the last two or three decades politics has shifted generally to the right in large parts of the world, and it has become standard for governments to crow about how badly they or their predecessors run/ran things and how much better it would be if every public service were privatised (despite extensive empirical evidence to the contrary), in order to get the political capital to sell off public services at rock-bottom rates to their chums. Sometimes this is accompanied by deliberately running services into the ground in order to emphasise the point.