I dunno. State schools are only sometimes and somewhat cheaper than private counterparts, USPS is sometimes better in terms of price + speed, but many times it loses to UPS and FedEx, and anyone extolling the virtue of government-run service should get an option to change their medical provider to a VA hospital and report back in a few years.
The uber thing is a good choice for Innisfil. They wouldn't have the money to roll their own ride share, and they can't afford the infrastructure to create a bus system.
But the interesting thing is that absolutely no one is proposing that; what's being proposed is Medicare-for-all, where you get your choice of providers (pretty much any existing provider), and you pay the government for low-overhead insurance through your taxes.
It's kind of a really obvious rhetorical bait and switch, but it seems to resonate with people.
Organizations like NASA or the entire US military apparatus are also government-run, but you never hear free-market conservatives argue that US military sucks or is inefficient.
On the other hand, there are plenty of private organizations that are universally hated, like Comcast, American Airlines, or Bank of America, which are also huge, bloated, and have tons of waste internally.
NASA just gave up on making rockets and arguably going private is going well for them.
US military is quite famous for inefficiency. F35, B2, the 100 million dollar gas station in Iraq etc. Given the mess in the middle east, effectiveness is questionable as well.
Those are private industry contracts.
US military is pretty effective in its primary function, but may not work as well when required to adjust to something like policing the population, sure. But that's a separate discussion.
But yeah, those were just a couple of examples. There are plenty others.
- University of California system, along with many other state universities.
- Various three-letter spy agencies
- Your local fire department etc..
I'd say that it doesn't matter whether any given organization is private or public. What matters is enough funding and semi-competent management.
Are there any policies that were built this way?
However, you can never really control for differences between the states, which means weak predictive value, and it's easy to argue about results. And given that the policies we're talking about are inherently political, facts and evidence don't necessarily contribute to policymaking.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy
A good government option shouldn't require ANY funding at all. It should pay for itself.
The government may wish to
- provide a service that pays for itself only indirectly in the long run like investing in its citizenry and their well being.
- price a service below cost to enable the citizens who most need the service to actually benefit from it
- serve the entire citizenry not just those profitable to serve
What these have in common is that they represent a transfer of value from those who have more to society as a whole. This is pretty much how every decent functional society in existence works at scale.
Virtually nothing the government does "pays for itself" because economic systems while useful are so bizarrely insufficient by themselves that I'm not sure I have words to express it. They suffer from insufficient information, outright corruption and outright failure to encode most of what is most worthwhile in dollars, cents, and incentives.
Those who believe in capitalism alone seem to be appealing to some bizarre pure state of nature that has never existed will never exist. Meanwhile ignoring the fact that everything about capitalism as practiced anywhere on Earth is a wholly artificial mashup of perverse incentives, short time thinking, rules, regulations, and customs based in part of what can be exploited, in part on what people think is right, and in part on what people think is useful.
Given that capitalism is as artificial construct as opposed to some ideal state its easy to argue that we the people ought to use our political power transfer wealth from the haves to increase the health and well being of society as a whole.
Because of this government options will often be aligned with what society as a whole can afford and will benefit from in the long run as opposed to what those directly benefiting right now can support out of pocket.