Memes

Ya know what was a foundational part of the American dream? Pensions. Ya know which employers still offer them? Counties, states and the federal government.

Private companies exist solely to make the people at the top very rich based on the stolen value of employee labor while dumping catastrophic losses in the public sphere. That's capitalism in a nutshell.

You'd have to be unbelievably gullible, naive, traumatized AND brainwashed to be a diehard for a system like that. But, somehow they've managed it. A deluded nation of Amway top performers just one move away from making their own imaginary millions. All simping for the system.

You wanna know something else? The majority of the world economy is already centrally planned. Not on the national level, on the corporate level. Business is dominated by a relatively few giant corporations with internal economies the size of some nations. None of them run free markets internally. Sears experimented with it, to their demise. Central planning is already the primary way that our economic lives are driven. It's just we let unaccountable billionaires do the planning instead of an elected body.

My government is mostly privatized. We even hired a consulting firm to figure out how the government could lower consulting fees. The consultants found that if we consult less, we will have lower consulting fees. We paid over half a million for that single report:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-federal-government-kpmg-consulting/

Australia is a live example of the fact that they're not. The state and federal governments have privatised a crap load of services and all they do is continue to hike our bills while providing less and less service. Electricity, water supply, employment services and more are now an absolute joke here.

Only someone who has never worked for a large corporation could hold the belief that corporations are efficient at making their product.

They're very efficient at funneling money to their executives and owners though.

My mom mockingly said once "do you want your doctor visits to be just like the DMV?"

Nope, I want my doctor visits to be more like the USPS. Compare their numbers to UPS or any of the others and it's night and day.

I remember in college we took a course on economic efficiency and the short takeaway is "the free market is extremely efficient, but only when the competing parties start with equal resources. the more inequal the starting position, the less efficient the market becomes." and to my mind that suggests that we should enforce some sort of "rubber-banding" effect so that a company needs to keep competing or else it will "drift" back to the mean over time. Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y'know? Capitalism but with safety guards would be pretty cool.

I mean, they are (at making profit), but funnily enough, you can't run a society when everything is profit driven 🙄

Having worked for both, I would say that most government offices are eternal, whereas private companies can vanish quickly. Sometimes without warning. Its really hard to kill a government office.

Makes me wonder, how did a necessary office survive during a junta or an overthrow? For example, how did the office of a postal clerk change from 1925 to 1955 in, say, Berlin? How does the average Salvadoran DMV worker view the changes in El Salvador since 1980?

How was a tax office run in ancient Babylon versus a modern one today?

I bet there's some weird insights into human civilization to be found in those stories.

Private companies are why Flint still has lead water pipes, and why Texas doesn't have a working power grid, and why you and I are facing a 30%-50% increase in our cost of living.

There needs to be MORE regulation. Not less.

Anyone who worked in both private and public would know both are not more efficient than the other.

Public services are chronically underfunded because of corruption. Private companies perform rabbit in a hat trick by making you guess what undisclosed ingredients they put in your food if they're not regulated, just so to save cost and make money for themselves!

They're efficient at maximizing profits for shareholders, usually at the dire expense of literally everyone else.

I think a big issue is that the government takes a decades long view. This is great because they can plan how to effectively manage our water and other large scale projects with longevity in mind.

Meanwhile, our corporate CEOs take a quarter of a year view. They'd burn the company to the ground as long as it happens after they are stepping down and makes them look good beforehand.

One point here: the government doesn't pay out a large chunk of it's earnings to people who did nothing to ensure that the product or service was delivered.

They got paid a large percentage of revenue because they're shareholders.

Tell me again why taking a big pile of money from customers, who are very likely not wealthy (at least for the majority), and giving it to wealthy people, is "more efficient" than the government doing the same job and just, not doing that?

If you cut out the profit, the "business" runs more lean, no matter which way you arrange the numbers. I would argue that a more lean business model is simply more efficient. The dollars going in simply result in more output per dollar. IMO, that's efficient.

Am I taking crazy pills here?

Ignorant AF.

They are better at maximizing profits at the expense of the employees, benefits, wages, local taxes and infrastructure. They work for the shareholders. They shovel money to the top few percent of the company. That’s what we call “efficiency”.

The government does not profit. They government pays standard government wages along with union wages and benefits. They maintain infrastructure. They are only as efficient as contracts allow.

Corporations do not have the same goals as government. One seeks to extract maximum profits for the few at the expense of the many, the other seeks to return to the many as much as is feasible in societal good - schools, roads, power, water, etc. at no profit.

Efficient at what, making profit for themselves?

If I had my way I'd make as many services public as possible. I cant stand tge fact that I pay taxes and the "public" transportation (train/bus/subway) isn't free. Imagine how much pocket change you would have if energy companies, telecoms (cell/wifi), and transportation were all gov-run? All that said I have no idea how that would translate in practice, its a nice little daydream I had.

I'm a private sector worker slacking off and shitposting on reddit/lemmy all day....

We are DEFINITELY NOT more efficient than the public sector

Possibly, but they have different incentives.

In Germany we are in the process of privatizing hospitals. This will surely go over great in case of you know another pandemic. You can bet your butt that a private company will cut staff numbers, they will reduce the number of hospital beds and they will do the least amount of work they can get away with.
I can't easily go to a competitor, now can I? We only have that one hospital in the city.

They're more efficient at getting money from the state and paying it out as bonuses or dividends

But surely you must admit that they do extract more wealth from the working classes for people who just move money around. Let's see your profit-less crown corporation do that. Checkmate /s

Private companies literally paid billions of dollar to dismantle a (more or less) effective government just so that they could say this (and its still wrong).

People: "Government should be run like a business"

Government: "Speed enforcement is now done by a private business. You're welcome."

People: "They're now trying to squeeze every less cent out of us with speed enforcement!"

Business: "Efficiency!"

Since companies usually have an autocratic structure, i guess they are.

Note: more efficient doesn't mean better for the people or better at all. It just means that they skip a few important steps.

I think the issue is large organizations are inefficient and inflexible, be they government or corporates.

You want small lean groups with a lot of autonomy.

Famously, the blue guys in Australia, defund our public infrastructure, go 'oh no, broken now, have to sell, only private peeps can run this / it will run better / for everyone's best interests' (simultaneously pats themselves on the back for bringing money in, even though that thing they broke, brought money in, until they broke it) also, spoiler, they sell the things to thier mates.

Depends on the situation I'd say.

More efficient at what though?

Neither is obviously more efficient than the other overall, it depends on the structure and the incentives. People worry about private prisons for example. If you make it so the government sends people to prisons and you pay the prison a fixed rate per prisoner, of course you're gonna get skimping on services by the prisons. If you instead give the prisoner a voucher for a prison and make them pick where they go and prisons get money per voucher they get from prisoners, you're gonna get competition on quality so you'll get high quality prisons. Opposite outcomes with just a change to incentives.

Private companies are efficient at making oligarchs richer and everybody else poorer.

This is something you really can't say one way or the other.

I could cite examples of sick, failing government owned companies that did better under privatization, or simply shouldn't have been governments owned in the first place. On the other hand, I could cite disastrous privatization efforts that should never have happened because they were vital services, or in the national interest. I lived through most of it in the UK when they were privatising stuff left right and centre - some succeeded, others didn't.

And if they stay under the control of government then they need incentivization and means for measuring success. Success doesn't just mean profit but it does mean value and quality of service. And in some ways that would require operating similar to if it were a private company.