Comment by vaccineai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaccineai | Hacker News Reader

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Good, we want the competent and skilled people within government to go to private enterprise in big numbers, so they can amplify their skills and effect in private enterprise. Then we can reduce the number of government agencies, because they are always less effective than private enterprises.

The problem is when we have the lazy and incompetent bureaucrats sticking around, and us the taxpayers are paying for their pension while getting back very little in return.

Honestly, I'm not sure what all the screaming and crying on hacker news is about; hackers are all about creating efficiency with unorthodox insights and skills. pretty sure no hackers have said "why yes, I've love to pay more in taxes for the bureaucrats to retire in style after doing very little"

> because they are always less effective than private enterprises.

I think this is one of those ideas that has been spouted for so long that we don't really stop to think about whether it is true. Private and public entities (and employees) certainly have different incentives, but they also have different mandates, and I've certainly known plenty of inefficient private enterprises and efficient public ones. Do you have any way of verifying or proving this idea that you can share?

> I think this is one of those ideas that has been spouted for so long that we don't really stop to think about whether it is true.

A lot of people with considerable expertise in the area have looked into whether it's true. They almost always come to the same conclusion: overall it's a wash.

If you look closer some industries (like say your corner coffee shop in a big city) are clearly better off private, and others like roads and fire fighting don't work when privately held.

In general a competitive market will out-do public owned, free markets that aren't competitive are worse than public owned.

But there are always exceptions. A fine example is the health system. I don't know why, but as the US demonstrates even with a competitive health market public ownership outperforms a purely private system by a fairly large margin.

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