Skipjack wrote:Look, I am all for private industry where it makes sense. Certain things dont make sense though. Education should be there for everyone, not just for the privileged.
Education always will be there for everyone. When you return 90% of someone's money back to them that you previously were taking from them, suddenly they have a lot of money to spend on things they see around them that could use some dough.
Aka, private charity would rise and fill the voids, and if you didn't like how one was performing, you could cut off its funding. Can't do that with government.
Infrastructural measures should also be done by the government. Private companies will have problems with e.g. securing the rights to build roads through communities. And then, you wont have much competition there. If you let the private companies build the roads on their own dime, they will want to charge the ones using them. So you have a road tax imposed on you by private company. Since you can only build so many highways in one place, this road will be without competition from anyone else. So this company will effectively have the monopoly to charge as much as they want. Seems like the perfect business to me. It is the return of the robber baron. I dont know about you, but I dont see this reducing any costs for the private citizen.
You're right, there's some instances where it's possible, and some where it's not. Problem is, right now we've got cities and counties spending money on roads that really don't need to be incredibly nice (like almost all residential roads). If you lived in a small subdivision with 50 houses, would you willingly spend $250,000 to completely tear up and re-pave that street? I don't know about you, but I can find a lot better way to spend $5,000 of my own money, and that of my other 49 neighbors. Heck, I can think of a lot better ways to spend $500 per year for 10 years of that money...
Same thing about sewers. If they are owned by private companies, they can charge as much for the sewers as they want. You cant have more than one sewer channel in the same spot, so you are stuck with the sewage company there. Since the free market is defined by competition and there is effectively no competition, you will get insane prices. Of course people can just return to dumping their shit into the streets. Say "hi" to the return of all the nice illnesses that come from that to me please! Oh and the stench!
A wonderful future you have invisioned there!
Who's talking about sewers and other "one-line-only" items?
Police and justice system also have to be government held. Otherwise you will end up with private militias fighting over territories... We have had that problem in the 1920ies when the militias of the socialists and the christian socialists were fighting over control of the country. This eventually led to the establishment of the Christian Social Austro Fascists.
Same thing I just said above. Courts to settle disputes, sheriffs to enforce the law, etc. That's an inherently public matter.
There are other things. Basic science research is rarely done by private companies since it often does not have any direct application (that usually comes much later when someone uses the results to make some invention). This basic research like the LHC, or Fermi, or some paleontological dig that gives us a better understanding of the world, is often costy and requires well trained people. Private companies dont like this sort of stuff. So again, this is the kind of stuff governments have to do.
And we've seen the GREAT advances in science spawned by these "basic science" undertakings... the LHC, the Super-Kamiokande, etc...
What these things have told us is *nothing* about anything of any consequence. Their conclusions and theories are mostly based on dubious theories about particles and what composes matter, etc. None of which has *any* real world application in the foreseeable future.
The reason private industry doesn't invest in these things is, like you said, they have no direct application. They *won't* have a direct application for many years because to simply take advantage of any findings (presuming there are any useful findings at all) requires orders of magnitude leaps in current technologies. AND, nobody purposely builds those orders of magnitude leaps in technology simply to get to a usable application for this "great finding", presuming there are any.
The point is, the results obtained by our billions of tax dollars blown on these things are *utterly useless* because in order to take advantage of them, we need technologies that are decades away, and nobody is going to invest in those technologies on purpose. Those technologies are simply going to be pursued through normal market conditions over time, and when those technologies are developed, surprise surprise, that multi-billion dollar "basic research" effort that my tax dollars were blown on decades ago, could now be performed with a few million dollars with other new technologies.
In other words, looking decades into what *may* be possible in the future is almost always a horrible waste of money, since those same findings could be made decades later for much less money and immediately capitalized on with that future tech.
The last is only made as a joke, not part of the actual discussion.