Myth: The private sector is more efficient than the public sector

[Ashton]

Work that is cheap is not necessarily work that is effective. This myth that the private sector is more efficient has motivated the increase in competitive tendering of public services to private contractors, and has been used to justify lower unit costs (and lower wages). However, lower prices are sometimes secured at the cost of service quality, suggesting that paying higher wages could in fact be more efficient

http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/a-bit-richInteresting perspective, anyone care to rebut?Also within this report it's quite interesting recycle workers provide more social value then say bankers. Common sense I suppose.

[SamuelS]

privatized != private. the recycling company, the "private" prisons, they're all granted a monopoly by the government, sub-contracting government work is not the same as providing a voluntary service in the market. I have no choice in level of service or price for recycling, I'm forced, by the city, to use Waste Management, Inc.

 

[RandR10]

What SamuelS said^^^

Even if this wasn't a government contract, if low prices are what you get instead of whatever you call efficiency, that's the value that people demand.  By redefining efficiency, this argument effectively moves the goal post, but it still doesn't make any sense.  If people actually demanded higher quality and were willing to pay more for it, that's what would be provided in the marketplace.  Because the provision in the marketplace is for exactly the thing that is demanded, this is still the most efficient outcome.

[J-William]

http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/a-bit-richInteresting perspective, anyone care to rebut?Also within this report it's quite interesting recycle workers provide more social value then say bankers. Common sense I suppose.

You have presented a beautiful example of someone who cannot think.

If they could think then they might have realized that what they are talking about for the most part is government contracts, and whether paying for the cheapest government contract or a more expensive government contract is a better way to get quality out of the government contract.

 

I mean talk about not striking at the root of evil… That's barely even taking a feather duster to the leaves of evil.

 

If you are going to be conflating the free market with competition for government contracts then of course you're going to make all kinds of ridiculous claims. But it's a little bit like a five-year-old who just put on his soccer cleats and shin guards trying to go up against Michael Jordan in a game of basketball. He couldn't play the game even if he was getting ready to play the right game.

[NGardner]

The government sets the standards for private contractors. The government is responsible for looking into private contractors records and references to ensure high quality. Price is not the sole component in a business transaction. 

[Magnus]

 

conflating the free market with competition for government contracts

 

 

It's horrible, isn't it?  To think that anyone could believe that applying to the government for contracts, as it spends other people's money, constitutes a "private" transaction ... So dumb. 

 

But it's worse than that -- Government can't make butter or clothes.  It must buy these things from manufacturers.  That's a straightforward contract.  Not private, but something of a quasi-private bargain, since people in the real world do buy butter and clothes, too.  To make this writer's confusion even more profound is that there are tasks that do not exist at all in the real world -- prisons, for example.  Governments can "contract" that service out, I suppose, but the contractor has no market for such activities, apart from government buying them.  Only governments buy prisons.  To call that "privatization" is beyond silly.

[StylesGrant]

Sadly government contracts to 'privitization' is the crisco that greases the wheels of a fascist guilded age style authoritarian culture. There's a lot of it.