> One thing Libertarians have right, is the idea that many government services are out of control with spending and not doing anything to actually help the peop

> One thing Libertarians have right, is the idea that many government services are out of control with spending and not doing anything to actually help the people they supposedly serve. How many of those services were purposely broken by libertarians, so that they could be targeted for privatization? I've worked in government, and have yet to see a service run more efficiently or cheaper after it's been privatized. The quality of the service is almost universally worse. When something is privatized, it's usually given a monopoly via bid. Now you just have a different set of people, with less experience, running the same service, with a percentage of the cost of running the service being siphoned off. There's also an incentive to provide less of the service, or run the service at a worse quality to maximize profit. The government has the option of running the service at a loss, but a private entity does not, further reducing the service quality level, often at the times you need it the most. When I worked in government, we had a software platform that was privatized. Every few years the contract to run the platform was put up for bid. To improve the likelihood of winning the bid, the vendor made the code purposely incomprehensible, wrote the minimum amount of documentation required, and kept most of the system maintenance manual. They most likely had in-house automation for most of the manual tasks, but that wasn't included with the contract. This also kept the bid price extremely high. When the contracts did switch hands, you'd end up with major operations issues after switchover, and numerous downtime events (this also made it harder for them to win the bid next time). Eventually it was considerably more expensive to contract out, but nothing is ever brought back from privatization.