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Comment by 0x262d | Hacker News Reader

everything in this comment is completely, empirically wrong. public services are more efficient and have been basically forever. where public services are bad, it's generally because they are desperately underfunded and cut into by the private sector and austerity governments, which under capitalism are nearly all governments.

https://newint.org/features/2018/05/01/the-private-sector-ef...

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Isn't underfunding a form of inefficiency?

no, efficiency is value in divided by value out.

This is a VERY biased source.

Also, there is a difference between how efficiently those services provide, and how well those services actually match consumer needs. The government can likely build cars more efficiently than anyone else, but would do a very bad job at determining what should be in a car or determining who those cars go to.

I don't think "unbiased" sources exist, that's a technocratic myth as well. And I think your second concern is only valid for bad public versions of this. The state is perfectly capable of whatever product planning our handful of car companies do.

It appears to me that you're referring to the means testing part of government assistance, which doesn't have much to do with the parent comment.

In addition, I'm curious in what ways is this source biased? I'm not sure an unbiased source exists, but I'm curious of your reasoning here.

Not means testing so much as allocation: I bought a small car because I did not need a big car and wanted to save money. This decision is easy in a market. If the government provides cars for all people, who gets big ones and who gets little ones. Does everyone get a tiny car?

They can build cars cheaper than anyone but can allocate them inefficiently.

This still comes back to a means test of some variety. For your example with vehicles, if you possess the means to not require a large vehicle (such as being single or having a small family), then you would obviously be allocated the smaller vehicle. This is vastly simplified than what such a thing would likely look like in reality. For govt assistance in the US for example this usually begins with your income level.

On a separate note, I'm still very curious of your answer to my question referring to the source.

> New Internationalist does not slavishly follow the conventional news agenda.

They specifically call out that they are an alternative journal, with a focus on very left policies. Which I can respect, but I thought it was a poor choice of source to make the point. A stronger case could be made by pulling a more independent observer who may site a more gracious collection of sources.

And I would like to point out that the article advocated for eliminating all means testing. So in the case of this (admittedly strained) argument. I get a car, but it must be the same car for all.

what? the answer is to democratically come up with literally any policy for assigning cars that makes more sense than "rich people get whatever they want". it can even have market aspects to some extent if necessary.

Choice is a luxury when a huge percent of Americans don’t have access to healthcare or would go bankrupt if they used it. Same thing with affordable housing, education, and countless other services.

>Choice is a luxury

It shouldn't be!

I’m talking about the reality we face right now using the example of healthcare, which tons of Americans don’t have access to. Which I feel is a bigger problem than the problem of choice.

Healthcare also being a public good that almost every other developed country handles at a national level with greater success (life expectancy/ childhood mortality, other major kpis) and far lower costs.

healthcare should really be the nail in the coffin of the efficiency argument. the reason it's more obvious that it works better provided publicly is basically that it's way more extensively studied and the US is such a great negative example of how privatization destroys it even in the middle of extreme wealth.

We have 12-13 years of free education for everybody. And virtually all Americans live in housing.

> This is a VERY biased source.

Are you unbiased?

There's no such thing as an unbiased source. Having actually read the linked article, it's a detailed, well-cited, and effective piece. Indeed, it seems the bias you complain about is based on the political stances of the publication and not any merits of the piece itself, as if critiques of capitalism are only valid when written by proponents of capitalism.

Further, this kind of vague belly-aching about the supposed "bias" of an article is very much against the spirit of the board. It casts aspersions, intentionally or not, not only on the article that was linked, but on the commenter who linked it. If you'd like to criticize the article, please do that instead.

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