Trump news the third

[khagler]

Dartz wrote:

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And, unfortunately, governments are something of a necessity these days.

Yet you give a bunch of examples of things that not only can be, but often are done just fine without governments in various places.

You can't privatise a police force. (The reason why should be obvious)

The US is absolutely full of private police forces called "security guards."--there's something like two or three times as many of them as there are government enforcers. You just don't hear about them much because they aren't above the law, and therefore don't go around torturing and murdering people with dark skin all the time the way the government thugs do.

You could theoretically privatise the fire-brigade, but it's a public service for a reason. (Everyone benefits from shit not burning down)

There are plenty of private firefighters in the US--both private companies hired by small towns, and volunteer fire departments supported by donations.

You can't really privatise the military. PMC's are toxic where they're employed. (Mercenaries being far to unreliable, and being outside the Geneva convention so the enemy gets to have fun)

Standing armies are just as toxic, and with some overlap of reasons, as the people who founded the US were well aware. That's why they wanted to rely on an armed citizenry. Sadly, the Geneva Conventions aren't really relevant as neither the US nor the people the US picks fights with pay much attention to them.

You can't really privatise the health service or ambulance service.

Both of these things are widely privatized in the US. 

Public transport services that run at a loss, but are necessary for some parts of the country.

Public tranportation (that is, city buses and trains) run at a loss because they're run by governments that grant themselves monopolies and don't care about money. It's pretty common here in the US for city public transportation agencies to spend huge amounts of money on light rail systems and subways that are absurdly expensive, of limited utility, and do take money from the buses that people actually use.

The same with infrastructure investments....

Infrastructure is a bit broad. It's pretty common in the US for city governments to grant themselves a monopoly on some things, like electricity, but there are also places where it's provided by private companies. In places where it's provided by a private company, there's generally just one politically connected private company that has bribed the government to give them a monopoly. Even then private companies are still sometimes able to get around those obstacles--Google Fiber, for example.

Where I see parasitism of the taxpayers money is in cases where a private organisation his hired to do something, and treats the government as a bottomless pit of money. Those are the true parasites. We had an utterly amusing one where a caretaker at a local school - which I used to attend - was telling me about how they had a company come in to quote to do a BMS system, and I asked him what he'd been quoted. He said, for arguments 100k or so - to which I told him he should've been paying a quarter of that. And the system was to be set up so that, if they even wanted to change the internal temperature of the building, it was an expensive callout charge to the company.

The real graft comes in to play when you realise all of this had been specified by a consulting engineer hired by the school, who was widely known to 'play golf' with the MD of the other company, and who wrote the specification for the project in such a way that no other competitor could comply. You can't prove it enough to call it graft or corruption, and the school, or the local councils, really don't know any better. They're trusting the outside contractor to do their job honestly.

That's where your fucking money goes.

Yes, that's absolutely a huge problem. A related problem is the practice of local governments stealing people's property and giving it to politically powerful real-estate developers. That practice even got an official Supreme Court stamp of approval a few years ago. I'm all in favor of getting money out of politics. The problem is that the only way to do so is to actually get the money out of politics, and that's very unlikely to happen because so many people have been brainwashed in government schools to believe that the world would end if it wasn't there.