Do you think private healthcare, post offices, etc deliver a better product than the public or nationally owned versions or is this just a myth fed to us to get us to accept more corporate control of our lives?
I’ve never had a problem with the USPS really, they’re slow but I’m not convinced that a private service would be any better. I’m pretty sure working at a private postal company would have fewer benefits too.
I’ve had a lot of problems with the USPS and almost none with UPS or Fedex. Don’t ever mail computer parts without insurance. They tend to go missing.
Its almost certain that there are some goods that should be provided publicly, and some that should be provided privately. Only the most extreme ideologues argue for one or the other extreme–everyone else is debating shades of grey.
Is there any useful empirical information available? For instance, records from a country that privatized its postal service not too long ago?
If you want to know that something really got to its destination I have heard the USPS registered mail is the only way to go.
FedEx/UPS tracking slips are all well and fine but lack the legal oomph that registered mail has.
The USPS has always been kinda ape shit about jumping on mail fraud.
If you mail your Comcast router back to Comcast the only real choice is USPS registered mail. Anything else and they may fuck with you (e.g. “We never received it.”). Send that shit registered mail and Comcast can try to go ten rounds with a US Postal Inspector.
General rule of thumb : if the good or service is a natural monopoly or oligopoly, privatizing will make that good cost more overall than a reasonably well run public version.
If it’s not an inherent monopoly, where economic forces make it most efficient for there to be just 1 seller, then a privatization makes things cheaper in most circumstances.
The royal mail was recently privatised in the UK, so we will see how that pans out.
Seems like there are very profitable sectors of the mail service, plus big loss-makers, so how privatisation deals with the latter will be interesting to see. Unlike in other industries, they can’t just forget about it as universal service is a legal obligation here (and in the US I would guess), so Farmer John out in the sticks still has to get his post, with the cost of the stamp being identical to anywhere else in the UK.
Some of the alleged efficiency advantage of private operations are due to features offered by or imposed on public services.
For example, public schools are more expensive than private because of their legal obligations to provide for students with special needs. The public post office offers services private posts do not. (Registered mail has been mentioned; I’m intrigued by the following trivia item.)
[QUOTE=United States Bullion Depository - Wikipedia]
The majority of the United States’ gold reserves were gradually shipped to [Fort Knox in 1937], including old bullion and newly made bars made from melted gold coins… The transfer used 500 rail cars and was sent by registered mail, protected by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the U.S. Treasury Department agents.
[/QUOTE]
Prisons are being privatised in the U.S., reducing taxpayer costs slightly. The gains come in large part due to the degraded food and health care provided prisoners, savings which would be politically difficult if prisons were government-run.
Another such hidden cost, which has been mentioned on this Board many times, is the Congressionally-,mandated ned for the Post Office to set aside vasst amolunts of benefits funding well in advance of retirement, something private sompanies aren’t required to do. It places the USPS at a considerable disadvantage
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-02/understanding-the-post-office-s-benefits-mess
When I was younger I used to do inventories of automotive dealerships.
To inventory a parts dept takes a crew anywhere from 4-12 hours.
Then I inventoried the LA County vehicle repair facility.
Holy fuck. Parts just thrown on the shelves with no thought of ever finding them again. Find part #123456 here. Then 2 more 3 shelves later then another 7 over the next several shelves. And dirty. The whole place was filthy. Just a pig sty.
Anyway we had two crews there for Six weekends in a row trying to straighten shit out.
The last weekend there was a pile of parts out on the shop floor about 30 feet square. This was all the shit that could not be identified during the inventory. Our job that day was to try and identify what we could before this huge pile of brand new parts was thrown away.
Your tax dollars at work.
What a fucking waste.
This would never happen in private industry.
In the late 90’s/early 00’s, there was a push to privatize child support collection. There were many commercials for companies who would collect child support for you, saying they could do what the government couldn’t. Some states even thought it was a good idea - private collection agencies were not union (read: cheap).
The only thing they could do that a government agency couldn’t is call and harrass anyone they thought might be someway connected to a debtor. Oh, and they could charge up to 50% of what was collected as their fee. They didn’t bring people into court, they didn’t enforce collection “remedies” (they couldn’t, by law), and they couldn’t do what is the primary collection method - income withholding through an employer.
Basically, all teeth; no bite.
How do corporations control your life? In what way?
The advantage of the free market, is that it is open to competition, more alternatives, more choices. If you don’t like AT&T, switch to Verizon, or Sprint. As a corporation, if you are not constantly trying to innovate or better serve your customers, someone else will come along that will and take your customers from you. Borders bookstores say hello to Amazon.
I think that the post office does a fantastic job, given the load it needs to shoulder.
I do think that health care in the US would be cheaper if it were nationalized, but not because the private sector doesn’t handle it reasonably well. The problem is that all other countries have nationalized health care, and that means that drug and equipment companies are selling low to those governments in order to have access to those countries at all, and are making up their losses by overcharging Americans. Unless the US goes single-payer, the American health-care consumer is going to get hosed.
According to the ACLU (pdf), “While supporters of privatization tout the idea that governments can save money through private facilities, the evidence for supposed cost savings is mixed at best”. Even if it’s cheaper on a per-prisoner basis, privatization probably costs more overall. Private prison companies are motivated to house more prisoners and keep them longer, so they lobby for tougher sentencing laws, helping to drive an increase in prison population. According to the ACLU report:
At least when the state runs prisons, it has an incentive not to keep people any longer than necessary. When someone’s stock goes up if prison populations are kept as high as possible, the outcome is kind of predictable.
By lobbying the government. When corporations successfully block government regulations or keep an industry privatized, it affects all our lives, not just the customers of those coroporations.
Hahaha. You wish. The only difference is that dumbass companies will usually manage to bankrupt or downsize themselves (potentially to be replaced by some new dumbass company) whereas dumbass government entities can pretty much keep on trucking. But huge companies in profitable industries can survive doing some utterly astonishing things.
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/02/23/362195/index.htm
A friend of mine worked on reconciling airline credit notes - a huge room in a basement, with rows of tables covered in heaps and heaps of pieces of paper, every one worth the price of an airline ticket to the company. With the shuffling back and forth and manual reconciliation, notes were always falling to the floor and being trodden into illegibility. At the end of every day the cleaners would sweep up a trashcan full of tattered scraps of paper and toss it away - probably the price of a nice new car, every single day.
And that’s just the ‘normal’ course of business. Once you get into the realms of malfeasance and executive madness e.g. Enron and their $100MM pool of bizjets, or fireplaces in scyscraper offices, all the dotcom money spent on concorde/champagne/cocaine, and so on and so forth, the sky is the limit.
That’s not controlling your life. The government has the freedom to enact laws or not. You have the freedom to vote for the representatives of your choosing.
Just curious which industries do you believe should be nationalized that are currently private?
Private prisons aren’t really cheaper. They appear to be cheaper for the same reason as private schools or private posts - they cherry pick the most profitable parts of the business and refuse to handle the more expensive parts. Public prisons and schools and mail are legally obligated to handle everything that falls within their purview. Their private competitors are not. So a private prison can refuse to take maximum security prisoners, a private school can refuse to take special needs students, and a private mail service can refuse to take low-density rural mail.
Because criminal court judges that impose sentences own stock in private prisons?
Yeah, I agree with this. I currently work for a big IT services company, and the inefficiency and lack of organization are just mind-boggling. I used to work in the non-profit sector (big quasi-governmental agency), and I too thought that private industry would be so much more efficient and less bureaucratic. I was wrong about that.