[gl338]

I really want to be respectful here but your comment shows a large level of ignorance around the difference between public monopolies, public UTILITIES, public (regulated) goods, and the economics thereof. A lot of public utilities were created specifically to enforce a level of quality and compliance and protect the citizen. In situations where the quality of goods is reduced below a safe level, you should not blame lack of competition, but call it what it is: incompetence at best, corruption at worst.

Good book on the topic that HN readers will appreciate is "The Master Switch": https://www.amazon.ca/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires...

[adrianratnapala]

I this is a little blinkered. You are making too much of merely verbal differences.

Government organisations do don't magically do what they were nominally made for. Like all providers, their work is the product of various human motitivations operating under under various kinds of control.

Approximately speaking: private providers are controlled by competition and regulation. Government organisations are controlled by politics and a command structure. Much of that is also regulation -- though sometimes under a different name.

What you call incompetence and corruption happens when those controls fail. The resulting organisation is very much like a private monpoly: it has no competitors, and the chain of bureaucratic control stops short of making anyone accountable to the public.

[grandalf]

Exactly. Very well articulated.

[grandalf]

I typed the comment in haste and so did not emphasize any of the differences. I think the main difference has to do with which of the entity's behaviors are regulated internally vs externally. This influences whether we consider failings to be incompetence or corruption, but it scarcely matters, since there is no chance for consumers/citizens to simply choose another option.

What sorts of contaminants in drinking water are harmful? How much contamination is too much? What tradeoffs are important when determining that?

Chlorine causes cancer, but it is added to the water supply to prevent bacteria growth while the water is in transit to buildings and residences. Those closest to the treatment facility get over-chlorinated water, and (assuming enough has been added) those furthest away get bacteria-free water.

Fluoride is also sometimes added to water, but it too can cause health problems. How much is reasonable, what is the right tradeoff between the dental health benefits of fluoride and the harms? Who is to decide this?

In Flint, the pipes began leaching harmful chemicals into the water supply, but the officials ignored reports of the problem. Why weren't citizens quickly aware that the water entering their homes (and bodies) was poisonous? Because the public trusts government to do a good job and not to be corrupt.

Public health standards dictate whether an old person gets stents or a coronary bypass operation or neither. There are age limits that apply regardless of health, because of the average health of people of certain ages.

In all cases, public health guidelines are fraught with tradeoffs that inflict intentional harm, usually to conserve resources, etc.

The problem is that the public believes these guidelines to be in their individual best interest. Th public also believes that water deemed safe by regulators is actually safe to consume over the long term, when it may not actually be.

Is it safe to ride in a car with seatbelts and no airbags? Is it safe to drink city water for municipality X for 20 years? How many people will die due to not having an airbag? How many due to low level contamination in the water? Someone is making this judgment call on behalf of everyone, but due to the need to preserve their political authority, the tradeoffs and weaknesses of the approach are not surfaced. They can't say "buy a home water filter" because then they are discriminating against people too poor to do so.

How many poor people live in buildings with water pipes that were grandfathered into code compliance but still create health risks? How much health risk is "reasonable" to prevent the landlord from having to replace pipes?

Similarly, regarding net neutrality, how many startups can never succeed because the "net neutral" latency is too high for the service they wanted to build?

Many of these things are minor, but across the whole spectrum of imperfectly regulated things, are all exposed to significant risk and harm. It's the things we don't tend to focus on (like what constitutes safe water) that are the most likely to harm us, and when we're grieving because a grandparent is sick we are not likely to be thinking about the standard of care that made him/her ineligible for a therapy that had a 1 in 5 chance of extending his/her life by a few years.

Institutions desire power and authority, and they often start out by doing some sort of useful service. But they are easily corrupted. One hallmark of tyranny is the creation of a top down idea of the "greater good". We must be vigilant to prevent our trusted institutions from embodying this sort of tyranny, even on issues that seem inconsequential or minor.

[tn13]

> A lot of public utilities were created specifically to enforce a level of quality and compliance and protect the citizen

Calling others ignorant does not help an argument. I think he had a point that when you let government control something it is the worst kind of monopoly and the quality is bound go down the drain. Whether it VA affairs, public education or IRS.

[josephg]

> I think he had a point that when you let government control something it is the worst kind of monopoly and the quality is bound go down the drain. Whether it VA affairs, public education or IRS.

Thats not necessarily true. Certainly outside the US there are many, many public institutions which do fantastic work. The ABC here in Australia and the BBC in the UK produce great television. The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) are highly regarded here, as was CSIRO before the government gutted their funding (CSIRO is an Australian government research group which invented parts of wifi).

I don't know if the reputation US government agencies have for incompetence is real or due to media spin, but the problem is obviously not inevitable. To quote Bill Clinton: "The problem with ideology is that it gives you the answer before you've asked the question".

[tn13]

>"The problem with ideology is that it gives you the answer before you've asked the question".

Yupp. Looking at checks signed by other helps make the decision lot quicker.

> BBC in the UK produce great television.

What for ? At what cost to public taxpayer ? Is it even needed to be run using taxpayer money ?

[shard972]

> The ABC here in Australia

As an Australian, aside from their news which last I checked doesn't get the same kind of views as the private companies I would disagree.

Maybe the parents enjoy ABC1 or whatever plays kids shows all day but I find the quality of their original shows to be quite poor and their flagships like QANDA have really gone off the rails in the last few years.

[8note]

in Canada, the CBC was pretty great until the conservatives annihilated their budget. In that time, they lost the license to the theme of their flagship show, Hockey Nightnin Canada, and after that, the show itself. Also, they lost the rights to report the olympics, and the news is much lower quality.

its almost like public services dont work well when you defund them.

[ACow_Adonis]

Do you have any data points of the private sector managing those things?

I only ask because I moved from government to private sector. In government we were all so frustrated that we were so inefficient and had to work with such backward technology and systems. So I left to get paid more and do things better for private industry...

I get paid more, but by god, we're about 10 years behind some of the practices we were bitching about in government, but we call everything a grand success and put out so much advertising and never admit failure and we don't really care about measuring or performance objectively.

I think there's so little cross over most people don't really know whether what they're doing it's objectively efficient...most of us in government had swallowed the line we were behind because that's what we were always told and things were objectively frustrating: so we bought that private is better. And this was despite the general observation that our private competitors generally put things out of lower quality and then arguing that we should be abolished because of our inefficiency/lack of need for us any more.

I'm not saying government is inherently more efficient than private sector, just that government involvement isn't necessarily more inefficient/desirable than private sector or deregulation.

Also, I think a part of this also has to do with the general cultural values systems a society has. Have government or private industry set up to deal with things the society genuinely doesn't value that much, and you're going to find its generally poorly done no matter who it's running the show...

[kalleboo]

> when you let government control something it is the worst kind of monopoly and the quality is bound go down the drain

[citation needed]

I think the US political climate seems uniquely poorly suited to having well-functioning government because it seems half the country is hell-bent on proving that government doesn't work.

I don't live in the US and I've only had great experiences at the driver licensing center and tax authority. My garbage gets picked up on time, the water is clean and safe to drink. Meanwhile at private services I've waited in massive lines at banks, and had poor service from telecom companies.

[8note]

In america, im sure most people would prefer leaded water if its half the price of unleaded stuff, too.

[ptaipale]

I doubt that. But there seems to be a very high level of distrust of government, on all levels.

[grandalf]

For a first world country, the US has tremendous corruption in government.

[roywiggins]

Water pipes are a natural monopoly anyway. It doesn't make any sense for FooWater and BarWater to build out two completely separate sets of water mains which all have to be maintained.

Whichever entity is running the water for a particular area, it's either going to be run by the state or contracted out by it. I don't know anywhere that isn't true, other than places where the water supply is so abysmal that people pay private firms to truck water around.