[quote=CA renter]
Believe it or not, my mind is open about this issue. If you (or anyone else) can prove to me that there is a net benefit to society when we privatize government assets, cash flows, and services, I will gladly change my mind. Until then, all anyone has ever offered is the same old rhetoric and propaganda from the privatization movement (who stand to benefit greatly…at the expense of taxpayers, consumers of government services, and workers), without any actual evidence to back up their arguments.
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I can envision a scenario where privatization of a government service would be more efficient, but most privatizations are not done in that manner. For the most part a privatization is a transfer of a government run monopoly to a private run monopoly. It’s the easiest to implement and the less disruptive to the people receiving the service.
Suppose the following scenario. City of San Diego gets rids of free trash pickup and opens up trash pickup to whoever would like to do it. Citizens would be responsible for picking and paying for a trash pickup service based on their need. You might see some people elect to drop off trash at the city dump themselves or they might elect to have somebody do it for them. You create quite a few low skilled jobs in the process and quite a few entrepreneurs that want to run trash hauling services.
After the initial disruption and turmoil this system would likely function at a lower cost and more efficiently than the current city system of picking up trash once a week on a scheduled day. Of course that disruption would be a painful process. Trash would likely pile up at some homes, illegal dumping would rise and other negative consequences would come out of it initially, but after a few years we’s likely find a nice balance.
Of course we’d never privatize in that manner because of those initial disruptions. Instead we’d likely hand a contract to one of the big existing commercial trash haulers and they would likely cost about the same. In their case the owners would likely get rich and the employees would suffer. But on the other hand if you opened it up to all comers and let the market figure it out you’d likely find cost savings and efficiency.
