I love your optimism about steps 4 and 5.

Except that the debt levels are unsustainable, mostly because of lack of competition, probably...

> It's the age old privatization "starve the beast" trick > 1. Defund and cripple gov. services

Probably? Government jobs pay below market and was like that way before the current president and the company.

> 3. Hand out contracts to your buddies.

I mean, Microsoft is getting about 15B from US government alone. Is Microsoft 'buddies'?

I agree in general that those tricks are old. The only difference I see today that they are done is less elegant way.

This, but with added cruelty.

The end game seems to be a state of permanent competitive insecurity for most of the population, with fatal consequences for dissent/bad luck/mistakes, while everything is owned and run for the benefit of a handful of aristocrats who exist in vapid self-indulgent splendour.

If this seems exaggerated, consider that most people are already only a few pay checks and/or a major health crisis away from homelessness, bankruptcy, and starvation.

There's 3a which is "cherry-pick customers / clients to make it appear that privatized services are more cost-effective than public services that are by default providing services." Picking and choosing one's customers already makes it an invalid comparison if one wants to talk about value.

But essentially creating self-fulfilling prophecies or moving goalposts is one of the oldest tricks in the book by dishonest folks of any ideological alignment. In an alternate universe where socialism / central planning is the default ideology if we wanted to make as unfair of a comparison demonizing private sector we'd have asked half of Silicon Valley companies to forego VC funding, not allow them to do M&A, demand that they be able to serve the general public for even the most obscure of problems, and so forth. That sets them up for failure out of the gate by measuring them against the criteria of the status quo and eliminates any of their advantages over a centralized planning system. And in fact, a large part of these ridiculous restrictions is exactly why NGOs are structured to fail to make much progress on any of the important societal problems they work on.

Wild idea: the problem is that society as a whole cannot decide whether given area should be managed by a private company, or the government, therefore it oscillates between these two states. We could avoid this problem by having an economic system that enforces smooth transition, so that instead of flickering between "private company" and "branch of the government" with each change causing disruptions, we'd experience gradual, less noticable changes. In other words, instead of having same laws apply to all companies, have different laws for different-sized companies, making them naturally grow into branches of government as they expand, and return to private as they shrink.

When did 4 happen?

This is precisely what’s happened with the educational system in many U.S. states:

1. Reduce funding and investment in public education.

2. Claim that our educational system is broken and we need to privatize.

3. Fund charter and private schools with vouchers while continuing to defund public schools.

Unfortunately, I have yet to see steps 4 and 5 where we return to well-support education for all.

It’s been clear since last year that this administration is a government specifically designed to hurt people.

Don't put down to stupidity anything that could be proscribed as malice (or something to that effect...)

Call it draining the swamp. So we can associate that phrase with stupid decisions.

Since at least 1980, no?