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Comment by weyland108 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is government services are generally inefficient because the motivation is welfare versus quality of service to attract more “users” (or to put it bluntly profit). It’s not run like a business and it shouldn’t be. ( I don’t think anyone would like the idea of public health program run for profit). I think the general premise of ubi being supplemental to some basic government services is an interesting thought. However I don’t think u can make government programs more efficient by throwing more money at it. The problem is not the money but the motivation when it comes to government programs.

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but they're not. that's a huge misconception. public services are almost universally underfunded and almost universally more efficient than the private sector providing a similar good with similar constraints (eg, being accessible to all rather than a subset of rich people).

"public stuff is inefficient" is the worst sort of received wisdom. it's exactly propaganda by rich people who want to skim profit off of things.

This is one of those put up or shut up things. We should be able to see through trial where people actually prefer getting services from and keep what's not broken.

> "public stuff is inefficient" is the worst sort of received wisdom. it's exactly propaganda by rich people who want to skim profit off of things.

This is a VERY bad faith argument. You are assuming the only people who disagree with you are either malicious or brainwashed.

do you not assume people who disagree with you are acting in bad faith or are wrong? there are really only 3 options there. (the third being that you are in fact wrong).

anyway those choices don't exist in a vacuum and markets don't have the all-seeing empirical knowledge libertarians think they do.

Reasonable discourse dictates we assume everyone is arguing in good faith: i.e. that we are all similarly able to come to good conclusions, that we actually hold these views honestly, and we at least willing to entertain the idea that we could change our minds. If you do not believe this about a discussion, why waste time in it?

The all-seeing eye works for supermarkets all the way to the producer, it works for housing all the way to the builder, it works for cars, it works for services like garage, additional classes, etc. There is no reason people will all of a sudden be stupid when it will come to healthcare, transportation or education. Point is, competition is transitive, and the last tier is always competitive. Therefore by iteration every tier is competitive.

Is there a way to quantify this claim?

You can directly compare the overhead for say US 401k plans vs Social Security. Even in the US such public vs private comparisons generally favor pubic options as significantly more efficient. Replacing the VA with private insurance would cost vastly more for example.

Though public options are often heavily restricted so context is important.

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