Had privatization ever worked out? Like, ever?
I was trying to think of a single example where it made the service better and I legitimately can’t?
Because it is never the service that privatization seeks to make better. Private corporations make more money. That is the only target metric.
Depending on the market, providing better service is what makes you more money, and a malaise creeps in about management not caring about that anymore when government ran. Besides, all my packages come by Purolater now, a private company owned by Canada Post that doesn’t seem to go on strike. They literally own their own competition and it’s profitable.
So, the capitalist brainrot belief is that Adam Smith’s invisible hand is going to make sure that money only goes to the people who deserve it, because people obviously will buy the best product at the cheapest prices and everyone else deserves to be pushed out of the market unless they do better.
Except we have consistant evidence that that isn’t true. The raw existence of marketing and advertising completely undermines the core concept of what is supposed to make private business good. “We’ll just make sure we’re the name people know and appeal to their cultural wants” is a complete subversion of how businesses are supposed to function. And then there’s the reality that once businesses have reliabily built themselves into the cultural needs of people, they don’t need to care anymore: see the process of enshitification in the mass of new business concepts - streaming services, 2nd party food deliver apps, etc. - and this becomes obviously true.
On paper, providing a better service should result in higher income. In reality, there are a million manipulatable factors to undermine this concept, and as we continue to argue that wealth is an inherent virtue, we’ll continue to give perceived moral superiority to the private businesses that will pull the plug on your grandmother’s life support if it will save them a dollar. Fuck that. The more services we can keep our of the hands of greedy CEOs and venture capitalists, the closer we are to a genuinely just world.
This is a very long winded way to admit the existence of gullible and foolish people
So “gullible and foolish people” deserve to be abused by corporate interests? We aren’t supposed to build a world that benefits everyone, regardless of how “gullible and foolish” they are?
Dumbasses deserve what they get.
