Criminal court judges follow the law in imposing sentences. Laws are written by politicians who are lobbied to make them “tougher” by for-profit prison corporations. The perverse incentive is, more prisoners = more money for a corporation.
I assume the implication was that you get prison time for petty crimes, longer sentences are served, and you are less likely for parole. Sure judges don’t directly go “lets get more prisoners up in this bish”, but lobbying is done so the possibility for a person to go to prison is more likely.
It does make sense tbh. Prison labor doesn’t have a minimum wage.
Johnny went to war, came back with PTSD, and is now in jail working for 30 cents an hour.
Edit: Ninja’d
Corporate lobbyists seem to have more influence on legislators than voters do. I consider that “controlling your life”.
Health insurance and prisons, to start with.
In addition to this good guideline, I’d offer that if it is socially beneficial to offer some services which don’t make maximum profits either a public or heavily regulated business is best. A great example was the Bell System, which was private but regulated. People there took universal service very seriously.
Lets get this straight. So you don’t like corporations because corporations can lobby the government and the government can control your life. So you’d like to give more power to the government.
And the United States has had almost no nationalizations of industry, and such an idea is pretty antithetical to most people. I’m pretty sure most companies spend $0 lobbying not to get nationalized, because its an idea that’s just beyond the pale of current American society.
Just the opposite here. UPS and Fedex only want to deliver “notices” not the actual parcel.
But no, privatization is rarely more efficient. The idea behind pushing it is that in the case of say UPS vs USPS, you go from a agency where the employee union donates heavily to the Dems- to a private company that donates heavily to the GOP.
*Follow the Money. *
The question is misleading because the OP is using the term “more efficient” as a synonym for “better in every way”.
If your priority is to maximize profits and reduce costs, privatization is inherently superior. Free market forces encourage companies to find cheaper and better ways to do things, or it forces them out of business.
One caveat to this is when natural monopolies. This is particularly evident with cable, phone and utility companies. The reason for this is that these companies rely on vast infrastructure networks. Once that network is in place, it does not make sense economically to lay three more networks of fiber optic cable, gas lines or railroad tracks.
Also keep in mind that just because wants and needs can be met more efficiently with the private sector, that does not mean everyone gets their wants and needs met. In a pure free market health care system, it may be possible that overall costs would decrease as competition reduces overhead from insurance company bureaucracy. However, there will always be some people who would not be able to afford those services.
Schools are another example. As a general rule, private schools are better than public schools. But this is because a private school is under no obligation to accept every student and provide them a service until they graduate. Private schools can select which students they will teach and expel them for violating the rules.
You seem to be trapped in the mindset that ANY government is bad, and it’s just a choice between having more vs. less of it. That’s absurd. There will always be a government, and what it does depends on who has more influence over the politicians.
There was a huge push to provide a Private Option or “Medicare for All” as part of the Affordable Care Act. Lobbyists for the health care industry made sure such provisions did not get included in the law (cite).
I think one clue is that FedEx (and IIRC, UPS also) actually use the USPS to deliver to some areas.
The suburb next to mine didn’t have municipal trash collection. Homeowners chose among five different private companies. There were continuous complaints about garbage trucks running before dawn, run over curbs, spill trash in the street, etc. Of course, with five different companies running in the same streets, unless there were actual eyewitnesses, the town couldn’t tell which company is responsible. The town finally franchised to a single collector. Still private, but not free market.
And one reason private businesses can be more efficient in some cases is because they can simply refuse to serve unprofitable customers. There are food deserts in major cities because supermarket chains have closed or won’t build in some neighborhoods. There are still areas within 25 miles of St. Louis where customers can’t even get high speed internet because the terrain is too hilly for satellite, the cable companies won’t run lines out to those areas, and the telephone company won’t upgrade without huge subsidies.
I don’t think you got it very straight. Scr4 said nothing about giving more power to the government. What he said was that he’d prefer that corporations had less power over the government.
If the government can control my life but I control the government, then I’m controlling my own life. If the government can control my life and corporations control the government, then corporations are controlling my life.
When it comes to trash pickup it seems the smaller the municipality the more sense it makes for it to be privatized. But as the municipality gets larger. Somewhere over 25,000 people and the economy of privatization fails.
An interesting article.
The reason for that is that if it’s privatized, a private firm can run a large number of small municipality trash operations and save on the overhead for any given small city. So the private firm is more expensive per citizen but less expensive per small city than the public method.
This agrees precisely with the rule of thumb I gave. Trash pickup is semi-natural monopoly because it isn’t as efficient to have 2 or more fleets of trash pickup vehicles in a given area.
A pure natural monopoly is something where the marginal cost to have 2 or more competitors is enormous. For example, here’s some pure natural monopolies :
1. National Defense
2. Roads
3. Water/Electricity/Telecommunication delivery. (the network of wires and pipes, not the facilities that supply the service)
4. Law enforcement/fire protection
5. Emergency medical care
The reason these are pure natural monopolies is that there is enormous overhead associated with running a military. You need training camps, the R&D to make modern weapons (all the major world militaries jealously guard the designs for the high end stuff so you need your own engineers if you want something competitive), the command chain, etc etc etc. Roads and utilities, in order for there to even be 1 competitor the cost more than doubles. This is because 2 sets of roads or utility lines have to be built, doubling the cost, and there is only 1 optimal route through space to reach each destination. If 2 sets of lines or roads are built, both have to take a suboptimal route and whenever they cross it gets complex and expensive fast, especially for roads. Private roads would need overpass/underpasses whenever they crossed.
A semi-natural monopoly is something where having 2 or more competitors is expensive but potentially cheap enough to make sense
1. Food delivery services
2. Trash pickup
3. Taxi services
4. Bus services
5. Postal/package services
6. Wireless communication services
In all these examples but #6, if a given city has 2 or more networks of delivery vehicles providing the same service, then both networks have to drive farther on average to cover the whole city. However, especially for individual delivery, the vehicles often return to a central hub with each trip - this is why cities have multiple competing pizza chains covering the same region because the total driving time for an area with 1 or N pizza chains is the same if each delivery driver always returns to the hub after each delivery.
Wireless communications are a semi-natural monopoly because cell towers are cheap enough that multiple can cover the same region. However, there is a finite amount of RF spectrum available for communication so it’s essentially a natural duopoly.
And then you have everything else. Honestly, even for “everything else”, I’m beginning to realize that almost any business has some tendency towards consolidation and “duopolies”.
The only possible answer is, it depends. It depends on a lot of things. For example, one reason health care is in such a shambles in the US is that the insurance companies and the private hospitals are taking so much profit. The main business of the insurance companies seem to be denying coverage. My physician DIL in the Boston area spends hours every week fighting with insurance companies instead of treating patients or managing interns (her other job). Who is paying for all that? In Canada, the provincial health insurance bureaus simply take it as their duty to treat patients for whatever. Sure there are limits; they are not going to spend a million dollars for a treatment that might prolong a life for a month. But you get sick, you get treated. The hospitals are all publicly funded and non-profit, by law. Yes, they want to get you out reasonably fast, but it is they who pay if you have to go back.
If a business is a natural monopoly (telephones in the last century), the best would seem to be a highly regulated private company. When I was in Switzerland for 6 months in 1967, it took the public PTT 6 weeks to give us phone service. There was a telephone in the apartment from the previous tenant and all that had to be done was close a switch, but doing it took 6 weeks. You moved anywhere in the US or Canada and you got phone service in a day or less.
Now take railroads (which I do when possible, how I hate airports and airplane service these days). In Europe, the trains are publicly owned. They are usually on time, fast, and you can go (almost) everywhere by train. And passenger trains don’t wait at sidings for freight trains to pass. That’s because the government owns the railroads and the track. What a contrast with here (US and Canada). The train companies own the track and they got out of the passenger business decades ago. So the government operates the trains and rent the tracks. So they must wait on freight trains. Several years ago, I was taking a train from Seattle to Vancouver, intending to go to the airport and take a plane to Montreal. Well a swing bridge in northern Washington State was frozen open and we had to wait for them to free it. Then we had to wait while three freight trains who had arrived after us used the bridge before we could. When we got into BC (with the usual forever stop at the border), we also had to wait at a bridge for a freight train to cross. I missed my flight. Fortunately, the airline didn’t penalize me, but I did have to take a red-eye at midnight and change in Toronto.
It depends.
…and in The New Budget, instead of just being able to [del]bribe[/del] donate $32,400 per year per candidate, now they can donate $324,000 per year per candidate.
So uh…how are they justifying this one? How can they present this to voters in a way that doesn’t sound like “we can now accept bribes of 10 times the previous size! Now only the ultra-rich will matter because we can get all of our money from a few billionaires and screw everyone else”
I mean, America has a decent number of millionaires who worked hard and long to earn their wealth. They drive F-150s and vote Republican. But even those people are mere peasants, mere rabble if there’s no real limits at all.
No need to justify it to the voters who already just elected them. Once higher spending is put in place, the unrestrained bullshit will fly even more fast and furious, as the bullshitters will have even more money to spend on further fleecing the voters. All that tedious mucking about with 501(c)4s will become last year’s nightmare.
One big factor is one that I mentioned earlier. Most businesses cover a range of transactions and some are more profitable than others. But unless businesses are required to cover the whole range, it’s meaningless to compare averages.
To illustrate, let’s say a public hospital is required to treat any patient and the average cost it spends per patient is $10,000. That doesn’t mean every patient required ten thousand dollars of care. Some might have required only a few hundred dollars worth of care. Others might have required hundreds of thousands of dollars worth. But overall, the hospital treats ten thousand patients a year for a total budget of $100,000,000.
Then a privatized hospital opens up and competes against the public hospital. It has leeway to pick and choose its patients. It charges the government per patient and only charges $9000 per patient. But it only treats the patients who need less than nine thousand dollars worth of care. If anybody needs more care than that, they get sent to the public hospital. So the public hospital is now only treating patients whose care costs $9000 or more.
At the end of the year, the government budget office compares the two hospitals. It sees the privatized hospital treated four thousand patients with a budget of $36,000,000. The public hospital treated six thousand patients but their budget is $90,000,000. The privatized hospital would publicize these figures as proof it was more efficient and its supports would claim it’s proof that the public hospital was wasting money.
What’s ignored is that the old system was treating ten thousand patients for $100,000,000 and the new system is treating ten thousand patients for $126,000,000. And the increased cost is mainly due to paying the privatized hospital $9000 a patient even though its patients need less than $9000 of treatment.
The usps will take a letter from me and for a scant…(what is it? 50 cents now?) and will take that to any person’s mailbox I indicate, anywhere in the gorram country. It’s a bargain at 10 times the price. Fedex wont do it for less than $7 and will not go everywhere that USPS does.
And people complain about usps???