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Comment by ShredKazoo | Hacker News Reader

People are saying that states and cities just need to raise wages, but that's not always possible...

>...vicious cycles happen at state/city level. Financial duress ⇨ higher taxes/worse services ⇨ decline in tax base ⇨ financial duress. There’s no solution for this. No one can "fix" Illinois. It’s trapped in its debt.

https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/12953914014637506...

Where are the anarcho-capitalists when you need them?

Seriously, I would love to see a state or municipality try an explicit move to private sector provisioning of "essential" services as an experiment. Imagine if instead of voting for politicians, you voted for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. The space of possible institutions is way underexplored, and the risk from a single failing municipality trying something radically new seems low.

https://fee.org/articles/the-man-who-outsourced-the-governme...

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Funny, I want exactly the opposite.

I don't give a fuck about 5 choices if they are all bad. In fact, most people in the USA are in this exact conundrum with certain types of utilities (e.g. Internet). In fact, public ISPs in the USA have a phenomenal track-record compared to their private competitors.

I want one good choice for my utility. Portland, for all of its problems, has a pretty excellent electric company, also named "PGE", which absolutely mogs the fuck out of the other "PG&E" that people on HN are likely more aware of due to the blackouts that the public private partnership, PG&E have instituted.

In fact, I can't think of any large-scale situations where public utilities in the USA were privatized and it led to improvements in services rendered.

As it turns out, fiduciary duty is kinda fucked up when you're talking about essential utilities. I want there to be no profit incentive.

PG&E has blackouts to prevent wildfires. It's not clear how switching to a different provider would solve that problem.

But even accepting your premise that Portland's PGE "mogs the fuck out of PG&E", under the scheme I proposed, California voters could vote to assign say 5% of California energy contracts to Portland's PGE and see how it goes. That % could increase every year if the voters think they're doing a good job.

The thing I proposed is not the same as traditional utility privatization. Utilities are natural monopolies, so privatizing them doesn't actually create competition. With the proposal above, the voters get to vote on exactly how much competition they want in each industry, including utilities.

Our little town has privatized garbagemen and you have something like five+ companies to choose from.

It seems to be working decently well.

But we also have a very local town power and water utility that is also working well, too. So perhaps it’s something else.

In Delaware, where I live, garbage and recycling pickup are done by private companies, rather than municipal governments.

The result is... Four different garbage trucks from four different companies clatter through my neighborhood in the early-morning hours of four different days of the week.

That is definitely the downside.

And if you allocate the contract city-wide each year very quickly there is only one company that CAN fulfill the contract.

I’d love to see something like an electric dumpster that collects the smaller cans and then goes to a main location to be truck collected.

The electric dumpster sounds like a great idea.

Your point about there being only one company that can fulfill the contract is a good one. My suggestion was to vote for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. I haven't worked out exact details of how this voting would work -- maybe voters could upvote/downvote service providers reddit style, and their contract percentages could be adjusted accordingly. But the overall thought was that if company A is currently providing 100% of Centerville waste services, and company B from Borderville is looking to expand into Centerville, they try to convince voters to assign 5% of Centerville waste disposal contracts to company B.

Monopolies arise because it is an individual's best interest to buy whichever option is cheapest. But it is in our collective best interest to have healthy competition. By having voters vote on what % of contracts should go to which provider, they end up choosing in our collective best interest, and keeping providers on their toes by maintaining a bit of diversity.

It's a bit of a wacky idea, I just had it this morning actually. My larger point is there is a disappointing lack of willingness to discuss and run small scale experiments on wacky ideas that could totally work :-D For example, the scheme I described incentivizes companies to tattle on each other for bad behavior like harming the environment! Isn't that interesting? It also goes a long way to address the classic problem of charter schools trying to goose their test scores by kicking out low-performing students.

You could have the garbage companies bid for the rights to serve a particular neighborhood, or pay a tax to the municipality according to the product of

decibels emitted * estimated fraction of the population sleeping at the hour services are delivered * population size affected

A big problem in this area is the public-run sewer systems, usually run at the township level. Many municipalities have sold to the big private water/sewer company, who immediately raised the rates by double or more.

Naturally, the outcry was that these 'greedy' corporations are taking people to the cleaners. In reality, the formerly public ran sewer was horribly managed. Maintenance and capital expenses were deferred from day 1, and now the bill is coming due. The bill from the private Corp accurately captures the ongoing maintenance and capital reserves, which the local gov just kicked the can down the road to avoid pissing off the voters.

Illinois can absolutely be fixed. It’s called bankruptcy and jails (for corruption) and the sooner you do it the better off everyone will be.

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