15 ms·

The Hidden Cost of Privatization

107 points by frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

sharemywin 9y ago
While it does cover a lot of interesting points the few things that I think it misses are research/innovation and unions/long term employment contracts of government employees. Not that there are easy answer, but those two things can effect whether a private company could get a job done cheaper. Also, doesn't talk about software infrastructure. Take Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook. Customer acquisition costs for lots of fledgling businesses are high because of the ad auctions paid for by consumer attention and net neutrality keeping bandwidth costs down for those companies.
- yequalsx 9y ago
  Getting rid of unions will increase income inequality. Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers former very much lag those of the latter. Private prisons pay way less too. But the people at the top get outsized pay. The cost savings to taxpayers are not sufficient to justify this inequity.
  - pizzetta 9y ago
    Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The impact on progress should not be discounted as an externality. Imagine if taxicabs or any livery service of any kind had to have a union member associated with it. Would autonomous cars make the same progress (for example, we can have autonomous subways/trains but they have to be "personned" due to pressure from unions). Or, imagine if we had them in research (drugs discovery) --the added bureaucracy researchers would have to manage and devote valuable time to. I am not saying unionization is absolutely bad --they have brought good things about to workplace improvement, but they also have externalities we need to acknowledge.
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      >> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? We are a long way off from being able to say high technology has truly caused progress. Right now, it seems to do more harm than good. People in the tech industry are slowly coming to terms with their impact on the world outside their sphere of awareness, but that newfound conscientiousness hasn't translated into much change.
      - pizzetta 9y ago
        I imagine the progress in microprocessors, photolithography, search, education, power generation, drugs discovery, communications, etc., etc., do have a measurable impact on progress of the species. Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability).
        rainbowmverse 9y ago
        These things are good, but have so far been applied carelessly and unevenly. This is where my comment about conscientiousness comes in. We need to start asking "For what purpose?" and "Who could this hurt?" more often. Packing more transistors into a CPU and working magic with algorithms to squeeze more out of them is not so good if it goes into a machine intended for surveillance and violating privacy, or to wipe out a million jobs because it can all be done by a few people now. We can keep packing the transistors and working the magic, but it's going to keep doing a lot of damage if the people responsible don't think about the human impact.
        pizzetta 9y ago
        I wholeheartedly agree we spend much of our technology on both frivolous stuff and dangerous stuff (things that are detrimental to the wellbeing of people in general) -but the good offsets the negatives, I think.
        JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    It's important to apply context to this. A minimum wage, among other things, forces businesses to prejudice against lower skilled workers. If the minimum wage is negotiated by the union to $18/hr but you only produce $10/hr due to lack of experience, disability, below average IQ, or you went to a failing public school then you're simply unemployed. If we remove this contractual minimum wage, you're right, it would likely have some minimal impact for the people on the margins of having productivity sufficient to justify hiring them on the union's minimum wage. However, everyone below that level of productivity now has the potential for new jobs, and with those jobs comes skills training and economic mobility. Unions do marginally help their members, but they harm everyone below them on the economic ladder.
    - pdeuchler 9y ago
      The incorrect assumption here is that people earn what value they produce. People actually earn (value_produced - profit + bargaining power). The reason for upping the minimum wage is all minimum wage worker unions have disappeared and an increase in the low skill labor market supply (mostly due to the loss of manufacturing in the US) have decimated bargaining power across the board. Plus, due to automation, a single say, McDonalds worker, "produces" much more value than his counterpart 20 years ago without commiserate increase in salary even accounting for a loss in bargaining power (i.e. the profit variable has shot up, meaning an unequal share in the benefits of the labor). Of course, that's just the high level theory... using just common sense those same workers are going to be automated away entirely, if the wage is 20 cents or 20 dollars it doesn't matter. So we might as well force companies to compensate them in the short term for their impending unemployment.
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        Two key things occurred during the time period you're talking about where wages stagnated in spite of massive increases in productivity growth. The first is that we actually started letting women get jobs. We increased the labor supply by nearly 40%. It's amazing that wages are not even lower than they are. The second thing that happened is that millions upon millions of unskilled immigrants crossed the border. This also, obviously significantly increased the pool of labor at the bottom of the economic ladder further suppressing wages.
  - pravda 9y ago
    >Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers former very much lag those of the latter. And here appears the Broken Window Fallacy!
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      What exactly do you think is "broken" when a worker gets higher pay? In the Broken Window Fallacy story, the total wealth in the system is decreased when the window is destroyed. In this example, no wealth is destroyed, it is just distributed differently. If you believe that wealth has a decreasing marginal utility as you become more wealthy, the more even distribution where the worker is paid more has a higher overall utility even though the total wealth is exactly the same.
      - sharemywin 9y ago
        "decreasing marginal utility" I know I'm bastardizing the meaning but it got me thinking about Elon Musk versus "prototypical lotto winner that loses everything" you could certainly argue that he is using his wealth(as well as others) to benefit society, ie. mars, electrification of transportation, etc.
        TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        But if you count that then you also have to count the billionaires spending money lobbying to be allowed to continue pumping carbon into the atmosphere or for more bombs to be built. If you start using that method of calculating utility, I wouldn't be surprised if the marginal utility is actually negative at some point.
fivestar 9y ago
The problem with privatization is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation--look at Russia after the USSR caved in and how oligarchs came to own factories and all kinds of infrastructure simply because of the gold rush moment where they could get away with it. Privatization in the US works the same way--the insiders get the deals, the rest of us get nothing. If there was a way to randomize it, we might be able to make it work. I don't like the current situation in DC where there is a permanent government workforce that is mostly unionized. It is bloated and out of touch and that's where the calls for accountability are coming from. Right-size that government workforce, make the employees actually work (I know many do, so don't downvote me--I was a state employee for awhile once upon a time, I damn well know how many people worked and how many read newspapers and napped all day). I bet if we were to perform some simple reforms of the federal workforce that the calls for privatization would cease. It's about creating better outcomes, and the last Administration was more about creating a huge dependent class everywhere possible of people who would reliably vote their interests.
- arethuza 9y ago
  I can recommend "The Oligarchs" by David E. Hoffman - it makes even the wildest stories of Silicon Valley sound very tame indeed.
- Overtonwindow 9y ago
  I'm a lobbyist in Washington DC and it is appalling The work ethic of federal employees. The governments hands are tied, they can't fire anyone, and if there's no work, they just sit around and do whatever they want. The federal bureaucracy is absolutely bloated, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. They get amazing pay, amazing benefits, amazing retirement, and if they screw up, there is really nothing you can do to them.
  - danmaz74 9y ago
    > They get amazing pay Who gets amazing pay? How much are we talking about? I don't know about the USA, but usually public employees don't earn that much (in exchange for high job security).
EGreg 9y ago
Look, I actually argue for social safety nets. I believe government's role can be defined simply as "ensure that the minimum expectations of society are met", with the full understanding that these expectations (running potable water, medical advances, etc.) increase over time and vary from place to place. I am totally fine with decentralizing government functions to the point of neighborhoods – many of you know that I'm in favor of more decentralization in general. However, even someone like me can say this article falls far short of supporting its audacious title. It's mostly a paean to Keynes and his concepts. In addition, it contains some fallacies: But, if the government covers the costs of the service, why not provide it itself? Why spend the time and money forming the partnership, and monitoring its outcomes, if it is going to pay for what is done anyway. Because when providers compete, quality goes up and costs go down. (On the other hand, when buyers compete, costs go up, which is why single payer systems lower costs.) The answers to these questions center on the greater efficiency of private enterprise and the consequent cost savings of public-private partnerships. Yet, studies of their use in infrastructure investment provide little support for this presumed cost saving Compare the VA to Medicare. Yet, many besides the users of a road benefit from it – the businesses on its route to name just a few. These would be hurt along with its users if its tolls reduced traffic flows, so that while tolls can be charged, and the maintenance expense of the road depends on its use, fees for its use must not impede its use. Well, as Hayek argued, everyone setting their own prices is a far superior system than central planning to set the price of a toll. And whoever would maintain a road would obviously want maximize their wealth by maximizing the number of cars that go through without a slowdown. They would not likely ignore the long tail of cars any more than, say, mobile phone companies ignore consumers who can "only" pay $20 a month. In short, this is a terrible reason not to have private ownership . In fact, by being a smaller, private organization, they might have moved faster to install EZPass - like solutions, as AT&T predicted back in the 1990s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA) Much better reasons include simply the guarantee I stated above: people expect to be able to access lots of roads, so they have to be public as a matter of policy. Another reason is standardization: they can expect roughly the same road rules on all roads. And so on. Perhaps as technology improves, more things can be decentralized and privatized. Self-driving cars can perfectly adapt to local road rules. Communities will be able to install their own wordpress-like government systems that would handle voting, taxation, safety nets, single payer systems etc. Governments are just management teams of organizations. That's all. Parks in a mall open to all visitors are not much different than public parks. Same goes for community rooms in a co-op. Recessions can be most easily fixed by giving money to the consumers, to spend on what they need, thereby "voting with their wallet". This is basically "single payer systems" or UBI. Here is a great debate on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
anonymousiam 9y ago
Rebuttal: http://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/the-impact-government-spending-economic-growth http://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/the-impac...
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  I wonder if they worry about their Climate Change denial impacting their credibility in other areas. If they'll happily take money from fossil fuel interests to try to undermine the scienctific community, who won't they attack for pay?
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  There are many defensible arguments against government programs from across the social and political spectrums, but they don't come from the Heritage Foundation. They have a severe beyond reason bias against government.
  - ooyy 9y ago
    Do you think Institute for New Economic Thinking, a think thank founded by George Soros, is any less biased?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
leroy_masochist 9y ago
Article is a summary of others' thoughts (mostly Keynes) without a clear thesis. Would have been nice to read, say, an analysis of why privatizing air traffic control is a bad idea despite the fact that the tech the gov't uses in that space is super antiquated, which in terms drives a bunch of inefficiencies and safety hazards in that particular sector.
- cowpig 9y ago
  Source? I haven't heard of a single crash in the US in years, despite millions of flights...
- Mindcraft 9y ago
  Evidence that private air traffic control use/would use more modern tech?
  - leroy_masochist 9y ago
    I mean, I think it's self-evident as a general point...but in this specific case they don't have any satellite data driving their weather analysis because the government bureaucracy is mired in an ongoing process to upgrade. Anyone who has done gov't software contracting has probably seen cases like this.
    - Mindcraft 9y ago
      Why a private company would invest on better technology if it doesn't have competitors? It's not profitable for a service provider to invest, and even if there are competitors, most of the time, like with cellphone carriers, they agree not provide a better service so they can all take their portion of the cake without expending a dime.
subverter 9y ago
The problem in Keynes thinking on "social services" is that it's impossible to gather all of the knowledge necessary to ascertain what those would be. That knowledge is dispersed among ~320m citizens (in the U.S.) who each have particular wants and needs. And even if you could somehow attain that knowledge in one place, the likelihood of finding consensus on how a particular "social service" should be offered is next to zero. The end result? Nearly everyone disagrees with some of what government implements, which breeds resentment and causes gridlock much like we're seeing today in the U.S. It doesn't have to be that way. By decentralizing decision making down to a level closer to the individual (if not the individual), more people get what they want. For example, right now there's a federal mandate for health insurance. Not everyone agrees with this mandate, so why not at least push it down a level to the states? California can still have a mandate for health insurance, and Alabama can decide not to. And then, why not push it to the city/county level? If you don't agree with San Francisco's mandate for health insurance, simply move to Oakland. You don't even have to move states, let alone countries. Why do so many oppose such a solution where everyone can much more easily find a place where they agree with the "social services" offered (or not)?
- bjl 9y ago
  Because a lot of people (most, even) don't have the resources required to just up and move cities, let alone states. Your 'solution' would be massively regressive - what if Texas decides to rescind Medicaid? Are those people who cant afford to move just SOL?
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Your 'solution' would be massively regressive - what if Texas decides to rescind Medicaid? Medicaid is a voluntary state-run program with federal participation standards. Texas could withdraw from Medicaid if it chose to, now. All states have chosen to participate since 1982, but they are not required to.
    - bjl 9y ago
      OK, so use any other example. What if Florida decides to roll back gay marriage? What if Alabama rescinds the Civil Rights Act? Are those who can't afford to move supposed to just deal with it?
stuaxo 9y ago
The non hidden problem is that profits need to be made. We are told that from profits everything else will be optimised for the better, instead everything is optimised to make a profit.
throw2016 9y ago
Things like universal health care will become non issues when the country evolves from being a collective of economic interests with identity rooted purely in individual wealth and status to a country with a sense of collective identity that sees no conflict in having everyone's back and building a healthy educated society. Individual excellence is as important as common structures and a collective sense of purpose and direction, no one achieves anything in a vacuum and one can't simply negate the other. Collectivism is not about getting everyone down but raising everyone up at least to a basic acceptable standard and level of opportunities, so that anyone with the skills and talent can soar and not just those with privileged upbringing and backgrounds.

While it does cover a lot of interesting points the few things that I think it misses are research/innovation and unions/long term employment contracts of government employees. Not that there are easy answer, but those two things can effect whether a private company could get a job done cheaper. Also, doesn't talk about software infrastructure. Take Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook. Customer acquisition costs for lots of fledgling businesses are high because of the ad auctions paid for by consumer attention and net neutrality keeping bandwidth costs down for those companies.

yequalsx 9y ago
Getting rid of unions will increase income inequality. Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers former very much lag those of the latter. Private prisons pay way less too. But the people at the top get outsized pay. The cost savings to taxpayers are not sufficient to justify this inequity.
- pizzetta 9y ago
  Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The impact on progress should not be discounted as an externality. Imagine if taxicabs or any livery service of any kind had to have a union member associated with it. Would autonomous cars make the same progress (for example, we can have autonomous subways/trains but they have to be "personned" due to pressure from unions). Or, imagine if we had them in research (drugs discovery) --the added bureaucracy researchers would have to manage and devote valuable time to. I am not saying unionization is absolutely bad --they have brought good things about to workplace improvement, but they also have externalities we need to acknowledge.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    >> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? We are a long way off from being able to say high technology has truly caused progress. Right now, it seems to do more harm than good. People in the tech industry are slowly coming to terms with their impact on the world outside their sphere of awareness, but that newfound conscientiousness hasn't translated into much change.
    - pizzetta 9y ago
      I imagine the progress in microprocessors, photolithography, search, education, power generation, drugs discovery, communications, etc., etc., do have a measurable impact on progress of the species. Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability).
      - rainbowmverse 9y ago
        These things are good, but have so far been applied carelessly and unevenly. This is where my comment about conscientiousness comes in. We need to start asking "For what purpose?" and "Who could this hurt?" more often. Packing more transistors into a CPU and working magic with algorithms to squeeze more out of them is not so good if it goes into a machine intended for surveillance and violating privacy, or to wipe out a million jobs because it can all be done by a few people now. We can keep packing the transistors and working the magic, but it's going to keep doing a lot of damage if the people responsible don't think about the human impact.
        pizzetta 9y ago
        I wholeheartedly agree we spend much of our technology on both frivolous stuff and dangerous stuff (things that are detrimental to the wellbeing of people in general) -but the good offsets the negatives, I think.
        JoeAltmaier 9y ago
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  It's important to apply context to this. A minimum wage, among other things, forces businesses to prejudice against lower skilled workers. If the minimum wage is negotiated by the union to $18/hr but you only produce $10/hr due to lack of experience, disability, below average IQ, or you went to a failing public school then you're simply unemployed. If we remove this contractual minimum wage, you're right, it would likely have some minimal impact for the people on the margins of having productivity sufficient to justify hiring them on the union's minimum wage. However, everyone below that level of productivity now has the potential for new jobs, and with those jobs comes skills training and economic mobility. Unions do marginally help their members, but they harm everyone below them on the economic ladder.
  - pdeuchler 9y ago
    The incorrect assumption here is that people earn what value they produce. People actually earn (value_produced - profit + bargaining power). The reason for upping the minimum wage is all minimum wage worker unions have disappeared and an increase in the low skill labor market supply (mostly due to the loss of manufacturing in the US) have decimated bargaining power across the board. Plus, due to automation, a single say, McDonalds worker, "produces" much more value than his counterpart 20 years ago without commiserate increase in salary even accounting for a loss in bargaining power (i.e. the profit variable has shot up, meaning an unequal share in the benefits of the labor). Of course, that's just the high level theory... using just common sense those same workers are going to be automated away entirely, if the wage is 20 cents or 20 dollars it doesn't matter. So we might as well force companies to compensate them in the short term for their impending unemployment.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      Two key things occurred during the time period you're talking about where wages stagnated in spite of massive increases in productivity growth. The first is that we actually started letting women get jobs. We increased the labor supply by nearly 40%. It's amazing that wages are not even lower than they are. The second thing that happened is that millions upon millions of unskilled immigrants crossed the border. This also, obviously significantly increased the pool of labor at the bottom of the economic ladder further suppressing wages.
- pravda 9y ago
  >Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers former very much lag those of the latter. And here appears the Broken Window Fallacy!
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    What exactly do you think is "broken" when a worker gets higher pay? In the Broken Window Fallacy story, the total wealth in the system is decreased when the window is destroyed. In this example, no wealth is destroyed, it is just distributed differently. If you believe that wealth has a decreasing marginal utility as you become more wealthy, the more even distribution where the worker is paid more has a higher overall utility even though the total wealth is exactly the same.
    - sharemywin 9y ago
      "decreasing marginal utility" I know I'm bastardizing the meaning but it got me thinking about Elon Musk versus "prototypical lotto winner that loses everything" you could certainly argue that he is using his wealth(as well as others) to benefit society, ie. mars, electrification of transportation, etc.
      - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
        But if you count that then you also have to count the billionaires spending money lobbying to be allowed to continue pumping carbon into the atmosphere or for more bombs to be built. If you start using that method of calculating utility, I wouldn't be surprised if the marginal utility is actually negative at some point.

fivestar 9y ago

The problem with privatization is a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation--look at Russia after the USSR caved in and how oligarchs came to own factories and all kinds of infrastructure simply because of the gold rush moment where they could get away with it. Privatization in the US works the same way--the insiders get the deals, the rest of us get nothing. If there was a way to randomize it, we might be able to make it work. I don't like the current situation in DC where there is a permanent government workforce that is mostly unionized. It is bloated and out of touch and that's where the calls for accountability are coming from. Right-size that government workforce, make the employees actually work (I know many do, so don't downvote me--I was a state employee for awhile once upon a time, I damn well know how many people worked and how many read newspapers and napped all day). I bet if we were to perform some simple reforms of the federal workforce that the calls for privatization would cease. It's about creating better outcomes, and the last Administration was more about creating a huge dependent class everywhere possible of people who would reliably vote their interests.

arethuza 9y ago
I can recommend "The Oligarchs" by David E. Hoffman - it makes even the wildest stories of Silicon Valley sound very tame indeed.
Overtonwindow 9y ago
I'm a lobbyist in Washington DC and it is appalling The work ethic of federal employees. The governments hands are tied, they can't fire anyone, and if there's no work, they just sit around and do whatever they want. The federal bureaucracy is absolutely bloated, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. They get amazing pay, amazing benefits, amazing retirement, and if they screw up, there is really nothing you can do to them.
- danmaz74 9y ago
  > They get amazing pay Who gets amazing pay? How much are we talking about? I don't know about the USA, but usually public employees don't earn that much (in exchange for high job security).

EGreg 9y ago

Look, I actually argue for social safety nets. I believe government's role can be defined simply as "ensure that the minimum expectations of society are met", with the full understanding that these expectations (running potable water, medical advances, etc.) increase over time and vary from place to place. I am totally fine with decentralizing government functions to the point of neighborhoods – many of you know that I'm in favor of more decentralization in general. However, even someone like me can say this article falls far short of supporting its audacious title. It's mostly a paean to Keynes and his concepts. In addition, it contains some fallacies: But, if the government covers the costs of the service, why not provide it itself? Why spend the time and money forming the partnership, and monitoring its outcomes, if it is going to pay for what is done anyway. Because when providers compete, quality goes up and costs go down. (On the other hand, when buyers compete, costs go up, which is why single payer systems lower costs.) The answers to these questions center on the greater efficiency of private enterprise and the consequent cost savings of public-private partnerships. Yet, studies of their use in infrastructure investment provide little support for this presumed cost saving Compare the VA to Medicare. Yet, many besides the users of a road benefit from it – the businesses on its route to name just a few. These would be hurt along with its users if its tolls reduced traffic flows, so that while tolls can be charged, and the maintenance expense of the road depends on its use, fees for its use must not impede its use. Well, as Hayek argued, everyone setting their own prices is a far superior system than central planning to set the price of a toll. And whoever would maintain a road would obviously want maximize their wealth by maximizing the number of cars that go through without a slowdown. They would not likely ignore the long tail of cars any more than, say, mobile phone companies ignore consumers who can "only" pay $20 a month. In short, this is a terrible reason not to have private ownership . In fact, by being a smaller, private organization, they might have moved faster to install EZPass - like solutions, as AT&T predicted back in the 1990s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA) Much better reasons include simply the guarantee I stated above: people expect to be able to access lots of roads, so they have to be public as a matter of policy. Another reason is standardization: they can expect roughly the same road rules on all roads. And so on. Perhaps as technology improves, more things can be decentralized and privatized. Self-driving cars can perfectly adapt to local road rules. Communities will be able to install their own wordpress-like government systems that would handle voting, taxation, safety nets, single payer systems etc. Governments are just management teams of organizations. That's all. Parks in a mall open to all visitors are not much different than public parks. Same goes for community rooms in a co-op. Recessions can be most easily fixed by giving money to the consumers, to spend on what they need, thereby "voting with their wallet". This is basically "single payer systems" or UBI. Here is a great debate on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk

anonymousiam 9y ago

Rebuttal: http://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/the-impact-government-spending-economic-growth http://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/the-impac...

ZeroGravitas 9y ago
I wonder if they worry about their Climate Change denial impacting their credibility in other areas. If they'll happily take money from fossil fuel interests to try to undermine the scienctific community, who won't they attack for pay?
rainbowmverse 9y ago
There are many defensible arguments against government programs from across the social and political spectrums, but they don't come from the Heritage Foundation. They have a severe beyond reason bias against government.
- ooyy 9y ago
  Do you think Institute for New Economic Thinking, a think thank founded by George Soros, is any less biased?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

leroy_masochist 9y ago

Article is a summary of others' thoughts (mostly Keynes) without a clear thesis. Would have been nice to read, say, an analysis of why privatizing air traffic control is a bad idea despite the fact that the tech the gov't uses in that space is super antiquated, which in terms drives a bunch of inefficiencies and safety hazards in that particular sector.

cowpig 9y ago
Source? I haven't heard of a single crash in the US in years, despite millions of flights...
Mindcraft 9y ago
Evidence that private air traffic control use/would use more modern tech?
- leroy_masochist 9y ago
  I mean, I think it's self-evident as a general point...but in this specific case they don't have any satellite data driving their weather analysis because the government bureaucracy is mired in an ongoing process to upgrade. Anyone who has done gov't software contracting has probably seen cases like this.
  - Mindcraft 9y ago
    Why a private company would invest on better technology if it doesn't have competitors? It's not profitable for a service provider to invest, and even if there are competitors, most of the time, like with cellphone carriers, they agree not provide a better service so they can all take their portion of the cake without expending a dime.

subverter 9y ago

The problem in Keynes thinking on "social services" is that it's impossible to gather all of the knowledge necessary to ascertain what those would be. That knowledge is dispersed among ~320m citizens (in the U.S.) who each have particular wants and needs. And even if you could somehow attain that knowledge in one place, the likelihood of finding consensus on how a particular "social service" should be offered is next to zero. The end result? Nearly everyone disagrees with some of what government implements, which breeds resentment and causes gridlock much like we're seeing today in the U.S. It doesn't have to be that way. By decentralizing decision making down to a level closer to the individual (if not the individual), more people get what they want. For example, right now there's a federal mandate for health insurance. Not everyone agrees with this mandate, so why not at least push it down a level to the states? California can still have a mandate for health insurance, and Alabama can decide not to. And then, why not push it to the city/county level? If you don't agree with San Francisco's mandate for health insurance, simply move to Oakland. You don't even have to move states, let alone countries. Why do so many oppose such a solution where everyone can much more easily find a place where they agree with the "social services" offered (or not)?

bjl 9y ago
Because a lot of people (most, even) don't have the resources required to just up and move cities, let alone states. Your 'solution' would be massively regressive - what if Texas decides to rescind Medicaid? Are those people who cant afford to move just SOL?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Your 'solution' would be massively regressive - what if Texas decides to rescind Medicaid? Medicaid is a voluntary state-run program with federal participation standards. Texas could withdraw from Medicaid if it chose to, now. All states have chosen to participate since 1982, but they are not required to.
  - bjl 9y ago
    OK, so use any other example. What if Florida decides to roll back gay marriage? What if Alabama rescinds the Civil Rights Act? Are those who can't afford to move supposed to just deal with it?

stuaxo 9y ago

The non hidden problem is that profits need to be made. We are told that from profits everything else will be optimised for the better, instead everything is optimised to make a profit.

throw2016 9y ago

Things like universal health care will become non issues when the country evolves from being a collective of economic interests with identity rooted purely in individual wealth and status to a country with a sense of collective identity that sees no conflict in having everyone's back and building a healthy educated society. Individual excellence is as important as common structures and a collective sense of purpose and direction, no one achieves anything in a vacuum and one can't simply negate the other. Collectivism is not about getting everyone down but raising everyone up at least to a basic acceptable standard and level of opportunities, so that anyone with the skills and talent can soar and not just those with privileged upbringing and backgrounds.