Debate Help...Any privatisation success stories?

[Kombaiyashii]

I'm having a debate with this person and he's stated to me that

"any move to "introduce a market" or "privately manage" or "involve the private sector" has been, without exception, an unmitigated disaster and has been of extreme detriment to the service."

Now I know this is a falacious statement, however I'm trying to come up with some examples where there have been some obvious success stories which are hard to debate otherwise...

Does anyone know any?

[Seraphim]

I'm having a debate with this person and he's stated to me that

"any move to "introduce a market" or "privately manage" or "involve the private sector" has been, without exception, an unmitigated disaster and has been of extreme detriment to the service."

Now I know this is a falacious statement, however I'm trying to come up with some examples where there have been some obvious success stories which are hard to debate otherwise...

Does anyone know any?

How about the USA as a whole? I think that should suffice.

[Elwar]

Does he own a cell phone?

Which provider? The government AT&T monopoly that lasted for around 50 years, or the many choices and calling plans of today?

[erowe1]

How about privatizing the church? That seems to have worked alright.

[ClayTrainor]

I'm having a debate with this person and he's stated to me that

"any move to "introduce a market" or "privately manage" or "involve the private sector" has been, without exception, an unmitigated disaster and has been of extreme detriment to the service."

Now I know this is a falacious statement, however I'm trying to come up with some examples where there have been some obvious success stories which are hard to debate otherwise...

Does anyone know any?

There's so many examples, it's not even funny. Here's a couple I've used on other forums in the "roads" discussion.



Everything you see here North of the 192 and the 4, and west of the 535, was built and is maintained by Disney. This includes multiple freeways, dozens of onramps/offramps, etc.

If you own a business, you want to enable your customers to get to you.
http://www.intercot.com/infocentral/images/transportation.jpg


I take a partly privatized road, almost every time i travel the 400 series highways in Ontario. I pay for it, but it's never backed up with traffic, always very highly maintained, and I've never seen a single construction job that causes a slow-down. It's not fully private, but to me it's a clear testament to the efficiency and quality of a market road system, over a socialized road system. They operate on the basis of providing a valuable service to customers, or else consumers will choose not to pay. The socialized roads around the 407 are constantly backed up, and constant under construction. They operate on a basis of what politicians decide needs to be done, and you have no choice as to whether or not you pay.

http://www.407etr.com/

Also, Think about videogames. It's always been pretty much completely privatized, and they keep getting cheaper and better. Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, are all competing for profit from gamers. Gamers choose the winners by voluntarily purchasing the games and consoles that they desire in the market. Just look at how much these systems have improved over the last 20 years, all thanks to companies pursuing market profits. Is there any reason to believe that forcing the videogame market belong to the "public sector" would improve it? Absolutely not.

Hope this helps a little.:)

[libertybrewcity]

the restaurant in the Capitol. They couldn't even run their own restaurant!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/AR2008060801765.html

[angelatc]

Package delivery. When the Post Office gave up part of its momopoly, the price for delivering packages dropped and the speed at which they were delivered rose.

Telephones: When Ma Bell had the monopoly, consumers had to pay a monthly phone rental fee. The price of residential service was low because it was subsidized by long distance charges. Those of us over 40 can remember when making a long distance call from your home phone was incredibly expensive. When the government turned it over to the free market, the price for residential service rose in the short term, but within just a couple of years it was cheaper than it ever had been in the past. People were free to install their own phones, to buy their own phones, and to shop for long distance carriers. Now, almost all residential landline plans come with free long distance, and you can get a working telephone at the dollar store.

Natural gas:Carter deregulated the natural gas industry in the '70s as a response to the OPEC embargo. Small gas companies popped up everywhere, thus reducing our dependence on what was then expensive petroleum-based energy. Today, natural gas is one of the lest expensive sources of energy.

What does he think functions better under government constraints? What "disasters" is he referring to?

Markets are naturally competitive. Any so-called attempts to "level the playing field" is only an attempt to limit competition.

[oyarde]

Check and see if Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has a website . They privatized the major toll road across the top of the state.

[fisharmor]

It took government 70 years to get telephone service into 50% of the nation's homes.
It took the market 10 years to get internet into 50% of the nations homes.
Don't let anyone tell you that internet was any less revolutionary than telephone, either.
Twelve years ago I took a networking course that went over topologies and connectors that have been gone a long time now.
Yet telephone service was all standardized, from voltages to connectors to switchboards - everything. And it was all under the control of one monolithic government-blessed monopoly.

Internet has been the wild west from its inception. There is still no governing body over the internet. Despite how many people want to think Google is doing it: they took the job willingly and did it better than anyone else for less money. That's how it works - someone realizes that one little sector of a business is utter crap and figures out how to make a buck improving it.

It literally only took 1/7 of the time for the market to achieve the same level of service providing internet as government took with phones. I'd argue that what they achieved is much better than the phone service of the 1970s, too.

[JasonC]

Shoot... why don't you use the examples of the early settlements of America that all started out in failure because of a communistic style of managing the settlements. Other smart people came to take over the settlements and noticed that they needed to privatize everythign and let the workers keep much of what they produce. The settlements began to thrive and the people were no longer starving. Tom Dilorenzo's book "How Capitalism Saved America" provides some good insight into this.

[angelatc]

It took government 70 years to get telephone service into 50% of the nation's homes.
It took the market 10 years to get internet into 50% of the nations homes.

I don't mean to argue, I am honestly asking your opinion. Wasn't that partly because the telephone infrastructure already existed?

[erowe1]

Check and see if Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has a website . They privatized the major toll road across the top of the state.

All they did was lease it out to a private company. That's the kind of thing Daniels has done a lot of. He has contracted out gobs of work to private companies that used to be done by government agencies (such as printing state documents). He hasn't decreased the scope of the government at all, just delegated out what it does to others.

I know that's probably still considered "privatizing." But it's no more free market than keeping all those things government-run is. What free market proponents want isn't just privatizing in that sense, but marketizing, where government responsibilities are not just delegated to companies the government pays for their services, but removed from government purview completely. I assume that's what the OP really means by privatizing.

[ronpaulhawaii]

The electronics industry. Moore's Law. Etc

[acptulsa]

During the First World War, the government woke up one day to discover that they had been contracting with so many railroads to deliver so much to Atlantic ports, it seemed like half the railroad freight cars in the nation were sitting dockside. So what did they do? Did they pay the railroads to haul the empties to where they were desperately needed? Did they give the railroads the time and the space to work it out? No. They came in and took over.

The result was an unmitigated disaster. Harding fixed it. It was all part of Harding's program to get the government out of America's way, and by doing so he kicked off The Roaring Twenties. Suddenly the recession was over.

Look it up for more.