>If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now

There's a wealth of clear evidence for this in the economic data in Eastern vs Western Europe, East Germany vs West Germany when Eastern Europe was under Soviet rule. The countries under Soviet rule were significantly poorer and to this day most still haven't caught up with their Western European counterparts.

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runarberg 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Eastern Europe underwent shock therapy and are today in many ways more extreme in neo-liberal policies then the western part of the same continent.

Western Europe didn’t start neo-liberal policies until after the cold war ended, and it went into full gear around the year 2000.

In either case. Is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s? Are trains running cheaper? Is power transmission cheaper now that energy generation, and delivery have been split apart and sold to private investors on the public stock market?

No, the answer to all these questions are no. Because efficiencies in a system don‘t care about the ownership model, and neo-liberalism is a religious like creed that operates out of idealism for a world that does not exist.

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JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> is garbage disposal in Europe so much more efficient now that it has all been privatized, compared to the mid-90s?

Is it?

> Are trains running cheaper?

They're up about 6% in real terms (or about 0.23% a year) since 2000 [1]. That said, I don't think most European rail is privatized, so this is a strange example.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/product/page/PRC_H... deflated with CP00

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runarberg 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Is it?

Yes and no. Garbage disposal is more efficient now then it was in the mid-90s, but that has everything to do with the infrastructure and nothing to do with the ownership model. More on that later.

The ownership of infrastructure and the operation are split where private operators are allowed to compete with national operators on the same infrastructure. This is true for trains and electricity, and in some cases garbage disposal. Many of the national operators are publicly traded with the national government being the majority shareholder.

Some countries in Europe have gone much further in privatizing the rail network then others. The UK being the canonical example of privatization, and Norway being an example of a country privatizing more slowly.

If the promises of neo-liberalism were true, we should see the efficiencies gained in the UK compared to Norway. Yet, no such evidence exists. And that is because efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> efficiencies correlate with the quality and the quantity of infrastructure, not the ideological policies that dictate the ownership of the operators I mostly agree. Infrastructure quality (including institutional quality) dominates. Ideology is usually cover for a lack of evidence. But ownership modes do create different incentive structures. Full private ownership is famously terrible in natural monopolies. It’s a well-known market failure and folks who proselytize fully privatized utilities are stupid or venal. For many other things, however, private ownership works. A good example is package delivery. (Train operation is a weird case. The UK fumbled. Italy did not. On the other end of the spectrum, DB is a trash fire.)

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rglullis 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Are trains running cheaper?

You are picking the textbook example of a natural monopoly as a way to argue against how free markets don't work?