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Comment by Kadecgos | Hacker News Reader

Yeah - the answer is that the cost to deliver a service from my local government is a lot cheaper than it is when it's coming from the private sector.

People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.

In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.

So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.

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The flip side is that sometimes things go poorly and the (lack of financial) incentives are such that costs might not get reined in for a long while.

You're making it sound like I am not already paying taxes for those "absorbing of costs".

That is where the income is coming from, of course. That is also exactly what I'm saying. The tax cost of paying for a public service tends to be, nearly universally, less than the cost of paying for the same service in the private sector.

While there are some pretty easy examples here, the easiest one is probably health care: The country that pays the most - by far - for 'average-ish' health care is the one where the system is privatized.

Healthcare is an exception because it is insurance in disguise and it is one of those things where a monopoly can be cost effective.

This works because the actual service is not monopolised by the state but rather a large pool of providers.

This doesn't apply to other services.

Except that public and Co-Op utilities are also noticeably cheaper to operate than private sector utilities. And also, public roads are basically universally cheaper than private roads (as rare as they are).

And public schools. And public communication infra. The list just goes on and on. It's not 'just healthcare' and the amount of data on this is so staggering that to suggest that the private sector running things somehow results in an efficiency gain of some kind is borderline brainwashed rhetoric from Fox News more than it is any kind of defensible position.

> public roads are basically universally cheaper than private roads (as rare as they are).

Do you have any numbers to support this? Governments spending stupidly higher than private sector for this, I know this as a matter of fact.

Same for the other claims about "public schools. And public communication infra." Per unit of service provided, governments spend upwards of 2 to 5x in major western countries.

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