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Dave Lindbergh's avatar

It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for. (Will Rogers)

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

I’d add that it’s not obvious that it’s privatization in the traditional sense of farming out work to privately owned companies under contract that offers the benefits. Rather it’s harnessing the power of incentives and competition to evolve the best solutions and we can avoid many of the risks of undesired optimization by offering that inside a public model.

For instance, rather than letting a private natural monopoly offer internet service or contracting with fully private companies to lay and repair cable for the state we might instead imagine a public system where each regional manager is given substantial leeway to buy their own supplies, choose employees and compensation levels etc and given substantial monetary/status incentives to outperform rivals. But not only could you smooth out the bumps of corporate failure by simply slowly letting the best performers swallow up more of their competitors but you could also minimize cost of entry and maximize dissemination of know-how

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