I'm definitely on board with governments owning stuff - I think the traditional issue has been that government jobs don't attract the best talent (lower pay / whatever). So the types of people that go to government jobs are the ones that like stability and moving slow. That's probably fine - but it has also given them the reputation for being really inefficient.

The natural response is to assume that corporation will be more efficient, and there the consumer will get a better end result. And, again, that was probably true for some period of time. The problem is in a corporate world you need to grow your profits by 3-5% a year (minimum) in order to be considered a "viable" investment. So what happens when your customer base isn't growing at 3-5%? Well you cut costs to improve your profits or you raise prices or both.

End result is the consumer ends up worse off, they got a one-time efficiency gain by switching from government to corporate - but then pay for that over decades.