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Comment by matlin | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I am big supporter of some form of UBI but there needs to be some thinking along the lines of what services can or should be privatized. For example, I think housing is one that should be. I would prefer to give people rent checks than to provide public housing in food-desserts and bad school districts. But on the other side, are we going to reallocate budgets from the fire departments and let people subscribe to their own fire fighters? I don't think so.

Would be interested to hear if anyone has a ideas or a framework to think about this.

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None should be? We've experimented with privatization in the UK. No field has been a success, every one has been a failure afaik.

Trains - Worse, terrible in fact

Housing - Went from 300k houses p/y being built by councils, to 30k by their privatized replacement. Now severe housing shortage 30 years later

Medicine - Terrible, caused deaths in covid crisis, privately managed PPE stocks were a disaster

Water - Terrible, all profits have been used to pay shareholders, taken on huge debt. little investment in infrastructure, ticking time bomb before bailout needed

Energy - Crazy price increases

Prices go up, services worsen, and debts pile up. Tell me again why you think they should be privatized?

All that happens is a bunch of privileged shareholders get to mooch off the public purse.

> Energy - Crazy price increases

I certainly agree that a lot of privatisations were messed up, but but in the late 1970s the UK's nationalised industry literally only managed to produce enough electricity to keep the lights on three days a week.

It was pretty easy for Thatcher and Blair to sell the concept of privatisation when that was in widespread living memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week

Does that look like a failing of the public sector or a oil crisis that targeted the UK specifically?

Given that the miners who were on strike all worked for the National Coal Board, and that coal was converted into electricity by the Central Electricity Generating Board, it seems like a pretty major failing of nationalised industry to me, yes.

Perhaps you failed to read the link, an oil crisis because Capitalism is fucking you over is not a strike.

In those examples, would you say they're all examples of privatization without competition, where the incumbent effectively owned the existing infrastructure and the barriers to entry for newcomers were high?

Can't speak for the UK but Tokyo seemed to do pretty well with privatized subways: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-10-31/why-tokyo...

Singapore has a pretty good quasi-public-but-transparent-and-subsidized healthcare system: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/25/15356118/s...

I think the jury's still out on if privatization is the primary factor for success or failure or if other complex factors determine the success/failure of these programs (I would guess the later).

Basically you can divide the economy amd businesses into

1. infrastructure and platforms (justice, roads, utilites, networks) - where privatisation results in disaster 99% of times

2. "typical businesses" - privatisation generally good idea

3. things inbetween (schools, healthcare) - neither fully privatized or centralized system works well. Usually a combination of both performs much better.

Eg. hybrid healthcare system deals with runaway costs by having a baseline health service provided by government and prevents soviet-style wasting, theft of material by employees, black markets and long lines forming by having a parallel market health system alongside.

Both can keep each other in check. One has to wonder why countries always deploy it in one of the pure forms.

> I would prefer to give people rent checks than to provide public housing in food-desserts and bad school districts.

It maybe doesn't always work out great in practice, but at least in theory, municipal governments do have tools for addressing these problems in a deeper, longer-view way than the market and private developers can. Left to its own devices, "the market" will just abandon those food desserts and bad school districts and you end up with the same hollowed-out inner city that was such an issue in the late 20th century.

Anyway, whether you bring poor people to a rich neighbourhood (with subsidies, density bonusing), or you bring rich people to a poor neighbourhood (revitalization, gentrification), there are going to be issues, but housing policy is something that requires long term, active stewardship, I think.

> I would prefer to give people rent checks

And then rents will augment by that exact amount, screwing up those who don’t get the check and nullifying its benefit for those who do. I know from experience as this is implemented in France (it’s called the APL). Lot of rents are higher than they should for students under the pretext this social aid exists.

For a "free market" to work, you also need elastic supply which we unfortunately don't in many larger cities.

Okay, the government could say if landlords increase their rent, then we'll increase their property tax by 5-10x the amount. If they want to play that game, we'll do the same, but much worse. Let's see what they do then.

A similar relationship exists in the US between ease of getting loans for college and houses and the price of colleges and houses. I don't know if causation is fully established but they do tend to go up together.

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