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I don't know why, but all of this "privatization" bugs the hell out of me. Maybe it has something to with wanting to see my taxes being used properly, rather t

• fifnir 8y ago
  > I don't know why You know exactly why it bugs you and you're absolutely right. I think what's confusing is how can other people NOT see these huge problems
• j_m_b 8y ago
  Ahh yes the classic "muh roads" comment.
• dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  United and Sunbelt rent out basically everything you need for a construction business. Think of it as spinning up more instances in the cloud. It's actually often cheaper after taxes to rent than to own, especially if you need 10mi of traffic barrels but only for the duration of the project. Since construction is highly seasonal it makes sense that a lot of the stuff you need on a per-job basis is owned by a few central rental companies. I bet if you tracked individual items you'd see them migrate north in the summer and south in the winter.
• kristopolous 8y ago
  Many are convinced that paying the workers, the lobbyists, shareholders, board of directors, and contract overhead is cheaper than just paying the workers directly. I've been investigating why people think this for years. I've read a number of books, listened to lectures, went to proseminars in economics at UC schools, took some classes ... Recently, I've become increasingly convinced it's actually just a giant hustle. It's an elaborate ploy that makes people money. Things like Demand Theory or the Efficient Market Hypothesis are modern astrology psuedo-sciences with real world evidence that's incidental or statistically insignificant at best. This is especially true for the second-order implications like privatization. There's no persuasive material evidence of the purported theory that privatization is more efficient. The most favorable evidence from the supporters (for instance, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition by Bent Flyvbjerg he has 3 more on the topic) say that private and public projects are about the same. They go over budget about the same and fail about the same. Other more critical quantitative studies show dramatically better outcomes for publicly controlled systems - look at Oxfam studies for instance. There's also a lot of evidence that the private systems however mint millionaires who make an absolute killing off the taxpayer. Just like 500 years ago how religious people controlled the narrative and set up the rules of society and "laws of nature" to basically be giant money trees for them, there's a new class of people who have done the same thing. Recently I've been studying where this economic school originated from (essentially Chicago Boys style) and what was driving it. I haven't found any serious scholarly work on it beyond things written by journalists. The journalists track it to various organizations that formed after the new deal (each author has a different boogeyman) but the narrative is essentially the same: create think tanks, pack the colleges with favorable people, witch hunt the critics through red/left/whatever baiting, silence alternative views, create a media through movies, news, and television that support this view and so on. Not because it's accurate, right, or correct - but because it makes them a lot of cash. The narrative actually changes. Groups like the Heritage foundation or the American Enterprise Institute move their goalposts constantly over the years and defend it on supposedly principled economic grounds. The problem is that you can often find, such as in healthcare, documents where they make multiple fundamentally contradictory arguments because the underlying market mechanics they defend are pliable devices of convenience to push the agenda of making private capital and that's literally it. There's nothing deeper, nothing more fundamental. It's a giant hustle.
• deleted 8y ago
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• spaginal 8y ago
  It’s done because private industry in most circumstances, does it better than government can, and at the end of the day it can be significantly cheaper and less of a boondoggle than if government did it all themselves as government likes to do. Think of the professional experience, supply chain, and logistics for each industry where you could theoretically involve government to control or produce on it’s own. The error of rolling everything possible under the sun into a government department, like sign laying, is you get a sign placer sitting around making a unionized $60k-$90k/year (for a $35k-$40k/year actual job), with a massive retirement pension that you will continue to pay for forever, a huge tax bill to cover the storage of all of these signs that the government has sitting around on a dirt lot somewhere, because they have zero incentive to rent them out and make money on them while not in use, and crumbling infastructure when the entire cost of the government does all attitude sucks the tax base and economy dry. United Rentals, as a private company, has a vested interest in running their company efficiently, renting out a maximimum share of their inventory for the most profit, and their profit derived from this is not immoral behavior because it saves all of us money at the end of the day and employs a lot of people along the way. This is one more thing we won’t have to worry about the government screwing up as tax payers. Now, let’s say a senator wrote a convoluted law that made it so only United Rentals can supply signs for government projects, cost be damned. That’s a more valid argument for moving it under government control if there is corruption and rent seeking behavior going on.
  • romwell 8y ago
    >you get a sign placer sitting around making a unionized $60k-$90k/year (for a $35k-$40k/year actual job) >United Rentals, as a private company, has a vested interest in running their company efficiently Indeed! So instead of the above, you get a non-unionized Joe the Sign Placer getting $25K/year for actual job (efficiency!), and Bob the CEO/Shareholder netting $25M/year of the difference. The government doesn't spend any less though, because: 1)Bob is the only game in town (at least as far as govt. contracts are concerned) 2)Bob pays the government for it to continue that way >Now, let’s say a senator wrote a convoluted law that made it so only United Rentals can supply signs for government projects, cost be damned. That’s a more valid argument for moving it under government control if there is corruption and rent seeking behavior going on. My only nitpick for this would be replacing "if" with "because".