Looking forward to 2016

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.