One agitprop I always bring up is that “capitalism is built on informed consent” to make people realize that the system is broken, because even the most ardent supporter of the system realizes that there’s very little informed and VERY little consent in what the system has become.
Exactly. The libertarian talking point that the market and private entities self-regulate because consumers “vote with their wallets” is nonsense. If people are misinformed or not informed at all, then people don’t have any choice at all in what is supposedly a free market! As I mentioned in another comment, we know many companies do not disclose what they put into their food products, and this is in spite of regulations also still existing! The Tesco supermarket chain in UK turned out their beef meat has horse meat and none were the wiser until it’s too late!
Neither is obviously more efficient than the other overall, it depends on the structure and the incentives. People worry about private prisons for example. If you make it so the government sends people to prisons and you pay the prison a fixed rate per prisoner, of course you’re gonna get skimping on services by the prisons. If you instead give the prisoner a voucher for a prison and make them pick where they go and prisons get money per voucher they get from prisoners, you’re gonna get competition on quality so you’ll get high quality prisons. Opposite outcomes with just a change to incentives.
My biggest worry about private prisons is that it incentives making more things illegal, longer sentences, disregard for recidivism rates, etc. There have already been cases of judges taking kickbacks from private detention facilities to hand out longer sentences. I guess this is a case of private companies corrupting government though. Government contracting stuff out to private companies is probably the worst of both worlds.
That is a completely legitimate concern. It’s important to note that even if prisons are publicly run, there’s still a bunch of private actors in the prison system in the form of the people who work in it. Prison worker unions and police unions lobby for more laws already to protect their jobs. Private prisons might make that aspect worse, but it’s not like it’s perfect now.
I remember in college we took a course on economic efficiency and the short takeaway is “the free market is extremely efficient, but only when the competing parties start with equal resources. the more inequal the starting position, the less efficient the market becomes.” and to my mind that suggests that we should enforce some sort of “rubber-banding” effect so that a company needs to keep competing or else it will “drift” back to the mean over time. Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y’know? Capitalism but with safety guards would be pretty cool.
Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y’know?
This is why aggressive estate taxes are so incredibly critical. People shouldn’t be professional descendants. And of course welfare provides both ladder and safety net. The fools who are trying to abolish one or both are working against social mobility.
Afraid to say this but that college course was capitalist propaganda. When you look at the actual facts it points to capitalism being trash in every metric except cancer-like growth for the sake of cancer-like growth, which of course it’s good at because that’s what it was designed for.
Private companies literally paid billions of dollar to dismantle a (more or less) effective government just so that they could say this (and its still wrong).
In my (Australian) public service career I have watched a team of 100 public servants deliver and keep updated a data capture and processing system
A large American service company now does that job with four times the people. It took years to get them to add keyboard shortcuts to their product - the original was entirely mouse driven; and their product didn’t meet contrast rules for months
Anyone who worked in both private and public would know both are not more efficient than the other.
Public services are chronically underfunded because of corruption. Private companies perform rabbit in a hat trick by making you guess what undisclosed ingredients they put in your food if they’re not regulated, just so to save cost and make money for themselves!
Definitely more efficient than NASA today. But private companies wouldn’t have been able to pull off the moon landing, which was NASA’s great accomplishment.
There’s a place for government programs and enormous piles of money.
SpaceX does one thing though… Well, three things. Rocket development, launch services and starlink.
NASA does a whole lot more, they have 10 times as many employees and far more suppliers than SpaceX does. SpaceX is basically a service provider for NASA.
This is kind of like saying that Lockheed Martin is more efficient than the department of defense.
Ok… So what does NASA do that overlaps with SpaceX? Apparently nothing. NASA is 100% dependent on private rockets. Are we supposed to call that a win or a loss?
Well one metric would be cost per kg to get something into space. I also recall a lot of people dying when NASA first started going into space, of which SpaceX has not had any rockets explode with people in them, but I’m not impaired enough to make that false equivalence like you did with Mars.
Of course my comment is false equivalence, because the initial assertion is false equivalence.
You can’t compare NASA and Spacex because they have different goals. NASA even contract many of their payloads to Spacex, which they wouldn’t do if they were in the same business.
Why wouldn’t there be warlords? I’m not sure how this comment follows. Without a government, you get both eggs in one basket, which the original commenter agrees is bad.
But government likes to starve the stuff they run to make it look bad so they can carve it up and sell it to their mates. See literally anything Britain privatised.
Anything with no competition trends towards being shit over time.
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