Originally Posted by
Shaudius
There's a lot here so bear with me.
The issue with these, at least in my mind, is not that the private sector couldn't do these things more efficiently, its that they couldn't do so and cover everybody. If left to their own devices private companies would provide fire and police care to those who could afford whatever price they chose to charge and the market bore out, but the poor would be stuck without fire and police care. The poor would wind up not having police protection or fire prevention, because they could not afford it. Now you might say, well then the government can subsidize their protection, but then how do you avoid the problem you laid out below with public support of effectively contractors providing shoddy service(but apparently not the military? More on that later).
Additionally, you also run into the problem that fire prevention isn't isolated, say the neighbor of a rich person's house is burning down, they are poor and can't afford to call the private fire department, the rich person can, how exactly is the private company supposed to prevent the rich guy's house from burning down while not preventing the poor person's, not only is this an ethical dilemma, its also a financial one. Suppose they go ahead and prevent the poor person's house from burning down, but he can't afford to pay them. What then? Do they just have to eat the cost, is the poor person going to be thrown in some sort of debtor's prison. Do you see the problem with this idea on a large scale?
So let me get this straight, in basically one breath you've said that public works are shoddy and that the contracts are either awarded through lowballing or crony bullshit, but the military contractors are the best around and are therefore given the best jobs. So is your argument really, the only good government contractors are military ones, all the public works ones suck? If so, how is that a problem inherent in government if they are able to hire good contractors for the military but terrible ones for other things. Wouldn't that instead be a problem with standards? The military has high standards for their contractors but the other agencies that hire contractors don't. Wouldn't that mean that the best solution would be to hold contractors to a high standard? But that would be like regulations, and we all know that regulations are bad and kill jobs, so standards couldn't possibly be what you're advocating for. Beyond that, the hardest jobs are given to contractors? That's why contractors took out Osama Bin Laden, and rescued the hostages from those kidnappers a couple months ago right? It couldn't possibly be that the best trained troops are actually troops and not contractors, that makes no sense at all, government bad.
These are private companies, that again, are not held to standards(remember regulations bad). This is not a problem with government, this is not a problem with the private companies, its a problem of monopolistic power being bad, whether its created through the market or through the government, but it doesn't make government inefficient or bad, it just means it made the wrong decision to maintain monopolistic power over something that while it was strictly terrestrial made sense, but in new modern world does not.
I'm not sure what to make of this one, public transportation is cheap, but its slow, if you want fast you pay more and go private. That seems about the way it should be. You should pay more for increased efficiency. Public transportation is the perfect example of the balance between cost and efficiency.
I don't know what to make of this one either, nor, admittedly do I know much about fishery. But it does seem to me that government regulation is necessarily in this area to prevent overfishing, which would not only be bad for human consumption of fish, but also for the ecological impact of destroying sources of food for other animals in the ecosystem. But I'm not expert on wildlife management, so I'd have to punt on this one for the most part.
You mean the Kyoto Protocol that the US is not a signature on and that China, while it has signed it, refuses to enforce? Yeah, non-effective treaties don't do much to prevent global warming, I'll give you that one. As for the Clean Air Act, see a lot of smug these days? Hear a lot of talk about the hole in the o-zone layer? the CAA seems to be working pretty well to me.
So in your scenario, what would a private company do in the event of a natural disaster, how would they respond, where would they come from? Who would hire them?
What? Yeah, just what is what I have to say to this one.
I'll give you vouchers, maybe, but it hasn't been tried on a large enough scale to say that the private sector when faced with the strains of the public sector in education would perform any better. Remember even with current vouchers programs public schools still exist, and private schools are not flooded with all the students that public schools used to teach just a select few of them. And basketball programs? That's your measure of a school's success, I know a ton of failing inner-city high schools that have excellent basketball programs, it has nothing to do with the education they are providing where it counts(I know that's foreign to a sports betting forum) in the classroom.