[anon291]

A 'cost' paid for by a private service directly translates into prices and salaries. Whereas a government wealth transfer program appears as taxation and handouts. Everyone likes the former. No one likes the latter. Why this is still confusing in 2025 is beyond me

[ryan_lane]

This is why I say it's propaganda.

The same underlying service is being done. It hasn't been cut. It's been shifted from a government service, to a private industry. The government pays roughly the same amount they were previously paying (or in a lot of cases slightly more, with the promise of paying less in the future), the private company provides the service as cheaply as they can, and takes a cut of the cost for profit, benefiting a small number of people, while providing a worse service level for tax payers.

This isn't a capitalism vs socialism thing. My issue with it is that privatization is blatant corruption sold as "capitalism". There's no capitalism here, because there's no competition, outside of the bidding on the contract. Competing on who can provide the cheapest service doesn't improve the service; in fact, it reduces the service quality to maximize profit. Reducing service quality to maximize profit would be fine, from a capitalism point of view, if others were offering the same service to the customer.

[anon291]

It really depends on the industry, but 'bidding for a contract' does not entail a lack of competition. Yes, for certain industries, like utilities, there is no competition based on the way things are set up (and really based on the foreseeable way in which things could be set up). For things such as requisitions of commodity items, then competition is not only possible but preferable. So I disagree with your blanket characterization of things. People really need to have more nuance when discussing these things. Privatizing railroads is different than privatizing food processing.

[ryan_lane]

I'm saying it's not competitive because they're not competing to provide a better service, they're competing to provide the same service at a lower cost, but the quality of the service is effectively always worse than the original government provided service. That isn't capitalism.

Capitalism would be to provide multiple options to the users of the service, and have the providers compete against each other in a proper market.

I used to work for the government (Naval Oceanographic Office), and I worked with the contracting agencies on areas that had been privatized and it was a nightmare. Every few years you'd have multiple companies bid to run the service, but for the most part the same contractor would win the bid because they wrote the software in such a way that only they could run. It had relatively no documentation, had piss poor processes wrapping it, and the subject matter experts worked for the contracting agency. When the contract did change, everything would grind to a halt. For sure, that was more expensive than the original government provided service, but once something is privatized, it can never go back.

I agree we need to have more nuance here. You for some reason think I'm suggesting that "things such as requisitions of commodity items" shouldn't be private, which is not at all what I'm saying. I'm saying that existing government provided services, like the post office, for example, are run cheaper and more effectively by the government, and turning services like these private is for the sake of corruption.