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Comment by InitialLastName | Hacker News Reader

This is a strategy we see from both sides. From the other perspective:

Step 1: Create conditions that prevent the government from solving a problem. Step 2: Declare that the public sector has failed and call for privatization.

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You're claiming a "both sides" problem in a system with extraordinary power imbalances.

Businesses in a free market aren't writing laws and regulations that can put people in jail. With government's great power should come an acknowledgement that it must solve the problems it claims it can, in the way it claims it can, or back the hell off.

The problem with having an expansive public sector is that it never stops expanding and has an extremely strong tendency of becoming unequal, disconnected or or one-size-fits-all as the scope/complexity of the programs expand.

This is particularly the case when our electoral choices at many a level boil down to binary options that may not project well for individuals with values/views that are largely orthogonal to the options practically available. For example if I were pro ABCDEFG, and one candidate is Anti ABC, and the other anti EFG; Which one should I choose when taken together the value of one set over the other is subjective and not even ordinal?

One mustn't forget that the power to do great good is inherently also the power to do great harm intentionally or not.

Competition is great for consumers. The government should be allowed to compete along with the private sector. The winners of this scenario are the citizens and the people who work for these companies.

I've seen exactly this scenario play out in Santa Cruz. Comcast had a virtual monopoly. Even as recently as about 5 years ago one of the best internet packages was up to 20mbps (4mbps in reality) for $40/month.

The city announced a partnership with Cruzio for municipal broadband and virtually overnight Comcast started offering 200mbps for $50/month. Today you can get around 400mbps for $55/month.

We should do the exact same thing with healthcare (public option).

I generally agree at a local/municipal scale but that generally doesn't scale well and is often relatively unstable if it is not operated as an mostly isolated entity given the strong conflict of interest of officials involved easily and often leads to regulating private industry out of existence.

Where do you see that being the case with broadband? There are many examples of private sector monopolies, but I've never heard of private sector broadband being regulated out of existence.

For telco stuff specifically it's more that local governments love to rentseek from the incumbents. The faustian bargain is that the telcos pony up and in exchange the government, usually local, makes it nearly impossible for new players to enter. Some of those policies might end up making it harder for them to operate but it's harder still for competitors. The same is true when hospital networks try to expand beyond state lines. The reasoning goes if I can't expand why should they?

How do you create such conditions if you are not the government? Who does the creating?

Imagine a company whose elected board members believed that the company should abandon its current market, should be scaled back or shouldn't even exist, and they enacted policies and made hires in accordance to those beliefs. That's what's happening in the US government.

Private equity is a thing and spin offs are not uncommon.

Yes, I made my comment with those in mind.

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