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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

It's the age old privatization trick:

1. Defund and cripple gov. services

2. Point to those, and say "See? it doesn't work. We should get private sector to provide those services, as the private sector is much cheaper and more efficient."

3. Hand out contracts to your buddies.

4. Years later, down the road, another sitting government will revert back to the original state - due to the private contracts turning out to be much more expensive than anticipated, and delivering sub-par service.

5. Next pro-privatization government is elected, goto step (1).

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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.

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.

We have that now. You saw all those billionaires at the inauguration, those people have grown into government.

But we do know what sort of things government is needed for. Public goods for example are generally better when handled by government. Private sector can help of course but they don’t like free riders.

by society you mean "a few dozen very rich men vs. a bulk of america". But yes, I agree. The former can work in the shadows and pay others to scheme for them, and then eventually the sheer will of people waking up pushes back against it.

I don't know how to smoothly transition that. it relies on a properly educated citizenship who knows their rights. But again, those very rich men spent decades decimating that.

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 will probably be another 15-20 years before we see the pendulum swing back for education unfortunately since we're still in the fuck around part of FAFO. It will take at least another generation of poor performance and educational outcomes before we realize that the problem isn't public education but rather the lack of investment in early childhood development.

I love your optimism about steps 4 and 5.

> 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.

> Is Microsoft ‘buddies’?

Yes?

When did 4 happen?

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.

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

>due to the private contracts turning out to be much more expensive than anticipated, and delivering sub-par service.

Mostly because the richest people keep stealing money through lobbying for tax cuts.

And its' happening right now. House passed a 900b dollar cut to Medicaid to fund the latest cuts. If you want to pay off deficits you need your biggest contributors to pay their share. But no one who harps about the deficit seems to want to talk about that.

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