How that is determined might also depend on whether as an individual you are a cashed up investor or struggling to pay the bills month to month?
Is there anything left to sell that is not there for social good, or critically and sensibly needs to remain under government control?
Given what has been sold off recently, including the titles registries in several states, it suggests everything is for sale. It is only a matter of time.
It’s unlikely to go to the ultimate end point. It might be government/s cease to own any services. In that instance is there any need for taxes as everything will be user pays? Zero taxes, zero funds to pay for the Parliament. An ex employer once told the staff it should be our goal to do such a great job improving how the business ran we would have done ourselves out of the job! I doubt that is a shared goal of those in control?
Counterpoint: There is precedent in history although not on the precise level of the nation state. When militaries are the province of volunteers some see little difference in privatisation versus the status quo. Mercenaries are usually better paid than ‘volunteer’ militaries so there could be reasonable argument it improves their lot. Are mercenaries more or less reliable? One can only look to the past for guidance, and consider some of the more extreme voices in international affairs might be moderated when their own skin was in the front lines or they were exposed as cowards as the cases might be.
Are mercenaries (defence or police) less accountable? It depends on the country. Increasingly government absolve their defence and police to the maximum possible, and sometimes put innocents through years of antagonistic litigation for redress that may never come. A paid ‘department’ could sack a bad member, unlike the difficulty in them doing it now under the auspices of politicians as well as public opinion.
While not something I promote, neither do I summarily discount it when considered against the evidence at hand.
Based on whats happened to bus services in this area… definitely prefer government owned. The privarte company couldn’t organise a p**-up in a brewery. Buses dont arrive on time (and in some cases just dont come at all). the “new and improved” timetables have made that situation worse, with kids waiting for buses to take them to school which dont come, people waiting to get to doctors appointments and having to get taxis or Ubers, its insane. The government run service was just never this bad. I was planning on selling my car and switching to buses, but the service is just so unreliable, I cant do it.
No, it depends upon who is paying the bills. Certainly fire ‘insurance’ is a case in point, where one house could be left to burn to the ground while the insured house next door is saved. Of course, there have been other models of ‘insurance’ that are even less benign - the “this business sure looks like a firetrap” model of extortion.
In the ancient Roman empire, the army often shifted loyalties based upon promises from would-be emperors. If the emperor failed to pay, they tended to live rather short lives.
The trouble with ‘outsourcing’ is that you can very easily lose control. Of course, this is the point in many cases - governments are happy to take plaudits but don’t like the blame and so outsourcing is seen as an option for keeping things at arm’s length. Unfortunately for said politicians, most voters don’t care about the ‘model’ of service delivery - it’s the government’s fault if something breaks.
The dream of libertarians is that there should be no government and we should all fend for ourselves. That’s fantastic, until you realise that it sentences a large proportion of the population to a miserable and terrified existence. Need the police? Did you pay that bill for the annual subscription?
The absurdity of this, that so many cannot see, is that weakening government does not put the power in the hands of the people but gives it to business that would then carry on unfettered. Putting big business in charge would give them less personal freedom than elected governments. Sure they would nominally pay less tax but, especially for the lower paid, that would be overtaken by ‘user pays’ on essential items. Think of the US health system pre-Obama, now triple it and extend that principle into other parts of life.
Libertarianism is the wet dream of those with large discretionary income who feel victimised by a progressive tax system and haven’t found the right tax accountant yet.
Elected government is far from perfect but it is to some degree accountable to people, business is only accountable to profit. For all its weaknesses democracy has the advantage that you can remove bad government without violence; that is not so of plutocracy.
Rollerball is more action packed and less politics. Pohl and Kornbluth did the corporate dystopia in 1953 “The Space Merchants”. A good read and quite prophetic.
Until the gov’t meddled, Telstra’s NBN-type plan had been FTP (fibre to the premises) which would have seen reliable high-speed services to each premises, not the dogs breakfast that NBN now provides.
At the commission’s (the ACCC) annual regulatory conference last week, (Rod) Sims criticised the many privatisations of government-owned businesses that have simply bundled up a public monopoly and sold it to the highest bidder, without doing anything to get some competition into the industry, or even to adequately regulate the prices charged by a now-privately owned monopoly.
“Privatising assets without allowing for competition or regulation creates private monopolies that raise prices, reduce efficiency and harm the economy,” Sims said.
I had not previously seen the links to australiaREMADE and I thank you for posting them. What a wonderful bunch of people. I’m reading the site slowly but it seems to me that this/that is the way forward. People before profit, and all that that means.
