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Comment by notlukesky | Hacker News Reader

The flaw with private companies providing a public service is inevitably the erosion of demand for public goods and standards. The public sector should be held to higher standards considering how large their budgets are and most of it is spent wastefully. Europe and other developed countries have a far superior public goods availability, service and outcomes with similar GDP going to the public sector.

In the US one has to compare all taxes including federal, state and city/county levels with other countries.

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Really? When I was in Europe we could never find restrooms (or water!) without shelling out a few Euros. And even when we bought water, it was usually not refillable, it was in a glass bottle. And the metros still had beggars coming though each car asking for money and sleeping on the ground so clearly homelessness can't be solved by raising taxes alone.

High taxes also have other cons and negative effects that are out of the scope of this particular argument.

Since you said "Europe" I can tell you that's not the case in e.g. Finland. Restrooms in Helsinki are free to use for everybody and water is free in all or 99% of restaurants and you can refill it as many times as you want. There are no beggars in public transport from what I've seen here in almost 10 years. High taxes are being put into good use [1] when it comes to homelessness.

I know that in many countries (including the one I'm from) this is the situation, but not in whole Europe.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...

There are sometimes beggars/junkies in the metro, but it's very rare and it's usually about asking money for cigarettes.

People confuse some Scandinavian and top EU cities with Europe. They forget that Paris, Greece and South Italy are also in Europe.

In general, Europe may have better provision of public goods, but I’m not sure this is true in the current context. For example, it’s much easier to find a free-to-use restroom in Phoenix, Arizona than in Paris, France.

> For example, it’s much easier to find a free-to-use restroom in Phoenix, Arizona than in Paris, France.

Paris has a metro for that.

edit: I bet Paris has more truly public free-to-use restrooms. It did take them a while to make them free and to keep many of them open at night.

https://en.parisinfo.com/practical-paris/useful-info/public-...

And yet Paris still smells like piss.

Ah, they are free now, so perhaps my impression is out of date.

It's actually even worse than that:

https://nyupress.org/9781479874729/the-poverty-industry/

> foster care agencies are hiring private companies to help obtain disability and survivor benefits from abused and neglected children. Rather than using the funds to help the children, the money is diverted to agency revenue or to state general coffers. Some foster care agencies take even more, such as taking Veteran’s Assistance benefits belonging to a child after a parent serves and dies in the military. The Maryland foster care agency drafted a regulation allowing it to take all resources from foster children

One doesn’t have to anything, and indeed, I won’t. You’re concern trolling.

What do you think concern trolling is?

And the "have to" has an implied "to get the math right". You're being weirdly hostile to take that literally.

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