[atoav]

Privatization just means that if you were interested in the outcome before (having water), they are now interested in the money that can be extracted from it.

And that means their interest is to but a modern branding onto an operation that has been stripped for wires as long as it works.

I grew up during a privatization wave in my country and the promise of the proponents always was that private ownership means waste is cut. Now all these sectors that produced decent services before have gone to shit. Be it postal, trains, highways, whatever. Everything is broken, underfunded, services less people for more money.

10 years ago when I said the same thing I would get a lot of counter arguments that all boiled down to: "Trust it bro" or "But governmental is more waste". Now these arguments don't come up nearly as much. Everybody can see it.

The thing is, if you want to avoid waste then literally the best strategy is to go into a desert where there is no service. No service means no waste. But it also means no service.

[fragmede]

Waste and inefficiency should be stomped out, but it doesn't need to be ground down into a fine dust and then vaporized into nothingness. A little bit of waste is fine. You want slack in your system in case of emergencies.

[atoav]

The problem with that attitude is that waste isn't that easy to define:

- what is waste during good times may be essential during bad ones. If your service utilizes 100% CPU during normal operation (no waste), it has zero slack for changes in the environment.

- what is waste for a manager, may be an essential service to the persons using it. So maybe that cell tower in a remote area may be operating at a loss, because few people live there, but to them it is essential (or to you, if you break your ankle during a hike). Privatized services don't have the goal of covering people, but earning money. Covering people may be a side effect, but it isn't necessarily the goal

- cutting waste can make the service less attractive as a whole and make it enter a downward spiral. E.g. if you cut all non-profitable lines in a public transport system your public transport system becomes less usable as a whole, as people now have a harder time fetting where they want to go. That leads to less people using it. That in turn leads to you having to cut more lines, which in turn... You get the idea. No service means no waste, any service has/to have waste

- some waste appears like waste because managers don't understand why it is there. Essentially a Chesterton's fence-type of situation. Like with the OceanGate submarine implosion, that essentially happened because the late owner of the company decided that all these lengthy certification processes the submersible industry had written in blood were waste and could be skipped. He didn't posses the expertise to know why it was there in the first place, so it was waste.

With some services the goal isn't (or shouldn't be) to do "something" as cheaply as possible while extracting value, with some services the goal ought to be to provide the service in a sustainable fashion to everybody ad infinitum, while trying not to waste more money than is necessary and creating budgetary timebombs for future administrations/generations/managers.

Those are entirely different incentives, leading to entirely different results. And depending on which service we talk about the reasonability of chosing one over the other may differ.

That being said, there can be real waste to cut. But cutting everything based on suspicion is very expensive in the long run.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The "waste" argument is standard neoliberal nonsense. There are very few situations where the private sector provides a better service for less money. (See also the UK's NHS, which still provides a very efficient - if increasingly broken - service, while being starved of cash.)

Like most neoliberal nonsense, it's not just a lie, it's a misdirection. What it really means is "Government money is being spent on providing a service for poor people, when it should be handed out to rich people."

It's driven by entitlement, not generosity.

You can see this very clearly in the way privatised CEOs are paid. The water companies quite obviously and literally prioritise CEO pay rises and dividends over service quality.

That's not an accident. It's the true meaning of privatisation.

That is what privatisation is.

The "customer" in privatised industries isn't the public, it's upper management and other big shareholders.

[billy99k]

"There are very few situations where the private sector provides a better service for less money"

The issue is when there is a monopoly. When you have a government monopoly of a specific industry, it's going to be poor. If the same thing happens in private industry, it's a similar outcome. There is no competition with the government, because they play by rules that makes it impossible to compete as a private business, so it's by default, a monopoly.

When companies compete, it's always better for the customer. Government run Internet (which is what we had before it was commercialized), was stuck in the same place for decades, with no innovation. It's pretty much universal and relatively cheap now.

In the US, you can look at the post office and private companies like UPS and Fedex. I used to run a business for almost a decade where I would ship out 100s of packages/week. The post office always had poor service compared to the rest...and the cost ended up being comparable. If you lost a package? with the post office, there was no real way to get your money back.

There's waste with government-run services because they never have to really worry about profit or losing money. Every government-run service I've ever used has been inefficient.

[ForHackernews]

Is the NHS "starved for money"? I don't disagree that it's verging on collapse, but they keep giving it more and more money. The budget goes up, both in real terms and as a percentage of GDP: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn00...

How much would be enough? 15% of GDP, 20%, 50%?

I'm generally in favour of public services over ruthless privatization but I don't understand how Britain is to survive as a nation of nurses and pensioners supported by a tax base of Uber Eats riders.