And private companies don't even have to be vulnerable, they can just do nasty things nilly willy, because it might be profitable and they might get away with it. Yeah, there could be ones that don't suck, and then customers could pick those, but when there aren't, when they all collude to be equally shitty and raise prices whenever they can -- which they do -- people have no recourse. They do have recourse when it comes to the government.
And for some things it's just too much duplicated effort and wasted resources, T-shirts are one thing, because we don't really need those, but train lines and utilities etc. are another. I can't tell you where the "boundary" is, but if every electric company had to lay their own cables, there would only be one or two.
And in the opinion of many including mine, for example the Deutsche Bundesbahn got worse when it got privatized. They kinda exploited the fact that after reunification, there were two state railroad systems obviously, and instead of merging them into one state railroad system, it was privatized, but because it made more money for some, but not because it benefits the public, the customers. Of course the reasoning was the usual neoliberal spiel, "saving money" and "smaller government" but then that money just ends up not really making things better to the degree privatization made them worse.
Obviously not everything should be state run, far from it. But privatizing everything is a cure actually even worse than the disease, since state-run sinks and swims with how much say the people have, whereas a 100% privatized world just sinks into the abyss.
And for some things it's just too much duplicated effort and wasted resources, T-shirts are one thing, because we don't really need those, but train lines and utilities etc. are another. I can't tell you where the "boundary" is, but if every electric company had to lay their own cables, there would only be one or two.
And in the opinion of many including mine, for example the Deutsche Bundesbahn got worse when it got privatized. They kinda exploited the fact that after reunification, there were two state railroad systems obviously, and instead of merging them into one state railroad system, it was privatized, but because it made more money for some, but not because it benefits the public, the customers. Of course the reasoning was the usual neoliberal spiel, "saving money" and "smaller government" but then that money just ends up not really making things better to the degree privatization made them worse.
Obviously not everything should be state run, far from it. But privatizing everything is a cure actually even worse than the disease, since state-run sinks and swims with how much say the people have, whereas a 100% privatized world just sinks into the abyss.