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Comment by jheriko | Hacker News Reader

> Either you let the company go bankrupt or you nationalize.

I vaguely agree with that sentiment, but the problem in practice is that government sucks at running things. They introduce layers of infrastructure that business doesn't and turn things into political footballs.

Although thinking about that for a moment, its a big problem on its own...

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They introduce layers of infrastructure that business doesn't and turn things into political footballs.

Have you ever had any interaction with any large business? They are bureaucratically indistinguishable from governments.

Actually they are distinguishable - many of my interactions with banks and insurance companies make the government look like a well-oiled machine.

I've never had any interaction with the government that was even 1/4 as screwed up as the health insurance/hospital pairing. It's astonishingly bad.

I can only conclude that the people saying things like "think healthcare sucks now, wait 'till the government's in charge!" have never actually had to personally deal with the healthcare system.

Actually, the only thing that's hit the "1/4 as bad" mark is the health care exchange, and my problems with it are chiefly attributable to 1) no standard Internet-Age-friendly national ID card or similar, so identity/citizenship issues are still ad-hoc "send us a fax and mail us a copy of your drivers license, social security card, and birth certificate" nonsense, which is a problem with far more than just interactions with government, and 2) private health insurance is still a major part of the picture.

It's like a machine to generate stress and take your money, with treating illness as a side effect. I'd gladly take single-payer over the dubious and mostly not practically available "freedoms" our current system affords me.

> the problem in practice is that government sucks at running things. They introduce layers of infrastructure that business doesn't

Actually, there is no evidence of this. See this report that compares the Govt run industries before and after privatisation: http://www.psiru.org/reports/public-and-private-sector-effic...

"The results are remarkably consistent across all sectors and all forms of privatisation and outsourcing: there is no empirical evidence that the private sector is intrinsically more efficient"

Even if it was more efficient, $31 billion of corrupt bonuses on top = no different from an inefficient government.

I think people tend to conflate government run businesses with government departments.

Government departments will often be more bureaucratic for the simple reason that they have many additional roles to their primary ones: They are subject to openness and audit criteria that no private business is; they're subject to leadership systems that need to be resilient to far more frequent and drastic changes than in most businesses; they're subject to performance measurement across a far wider set of criteria than most private businesses etc.

> "The results are remarkably consistent across all sectors and all forms of privatisation and outsourcing: there is no empirical evidence that the private sector is intrinsically more efficient"

Exactly this. I've spent years in both sectors. People suck at running things, not governments.

At least those inefficient companies could be disrupted by startups, and at least they don't get to take my money by force (apart from subsidies and bailouts). No such mechanism exists for government. That people suck at running things is the very reason we need this rise-and-fall structure.

The UK government nationalised RBS and thus far RBS does not seem to be particularly badly run or more bureaucratic when compared to other banks, so I'm not sure there's any real evidence for this statement.

In fact the UK government is expected to make a tidy profit when it privatises RBS again.

> government sucks at running things

Because a company that needs to be bailed out was doing a great job...

You should have seen how banks were run in Italy when they were essentially the financial wings of various political parties.

Anyway, this is pretty clearly about politics, so... article flagged.

You should either participate in a discussion OR flag it as inappropriate, because the second you agree to engage, you believe the conversation has some merit on this forum.

Edit: I can't reply to you for some reason, but I didn't downvote you. However, saying "downvote" instead of just doing it, and then flaunting your karma score and elevating yourself to the position of de-facto moderator seems much like saying "here is MY political opinion, and now I will work to shut down any further discussion on the subject."

If no one mentions that something is inappropriate, the site will gradually migrate towards politics, because the number of people interested in that is vastly superior to the number interested in "HN" topics.

Also: I don't really care about your downvotes, because I've accumulated more than enough of this otherwise useless 'karma' that I'm happy to spend in order to make HN better by keeping politics and 'outrage stories' off of it.

>I vaguely agree with that sentiment, but the problem in practice is that government sucks at running things.

The government could be no worse than a management team that has already proven its dedication to running the company into the ground.

I don't see why governments can't nationalise industries such as oil extraction. Seems like a lot simpler of a business model than banking and very lucrative as well.

They can and have - a nice example of this is Norway vs the UK\Scotland. When oil reserves were found in the North Sea both Norway and the UK had claims which were (iirc) roughly similarly sized. They chose completely different paths, with Norway establishing a state owned oil company (Statoil) to handle exploration, extraction and processing with stipulations on what should be done with the windfall. The UK ended up selling licenses to private companies to handle this themselves.

As a result of this Norway now has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. It's pretty hard to make direct comparisons given the differences in their populations and economies, but a fairly broad range (i.e. left and right [1][2][3][4]) of people seem to think that this was a wasted opportunity and that if it was managed better they'd have a lot more to show for the last 3 1/2 decades. I'd tend to agree.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/13/north-s... [2] http://www.bbc.com/news/business-19871411 [3] http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570842-oil-ma... [4] http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/thatcher-and-no...

edit: A little more digging seems to indicate that I was painting with slightly broad strokes. Norway do indeed operate some sort of licensing scheme according to the "North Sea oil" wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_oil), so it is not entirely operated by Statoil.

Norway certainly does have private exploration too, but note that we also levy massive extra taxes on oil companies, which adds up to something like 70% total, vs. 28% corporation tax on the profits of most other businesses.

I believe the licensing system also takes into account investment and effects on local economy to an extent that creates substantial capital inflow beyond what you'd otherwise see.

It's not the federal government, but my favorite example was a (legal) brothel went bankrupt in Nevada a few years ago. The state of Nevada took it over until they could find a buyer, and lost money on the deal.

Seriously, Nevada's state government couldn't turn a profit running a brothel.

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