We’re all in on the culture war now
Typical conservative strategy:
- Public thing exists
- Become a lead weight in government so public thing gets underfunded and cannot adapt to market changes.
- Public thing no longer meets expectations.
- “See? It should be privatized and you won’t have this issue”
- Privatize thing. A few people make a crap load of money in the transition. Thing starts out acceptable for the first few years.
- “Oh no, capitalism uses an infinite growth ponzi model. How do we increase shareholder value this year?”
- Private thing gets underfunded and consumers get manipulated and abused.
Are we winning yet?
Privatized public transportation rarely works. At most you’ll find some success stories of companies that partnered with a government to jointly service a transportation line.
Thanks for providing these examples. They completely changed my mind about public transportation privatization
Didn’t England already go through that, and wasn’t it a complete failure ? someone knowledgeable quick please
Relevant video: https://youtu.be/DlTq8DbRs4k?si=y-muiI81MKk3gin0
Privatized railways are mostly failures most of the time. Besides Brightline, and I think a bunch of the Japanese railway companies, no nation really has privatized passenger rail. But I think the Japanese system has a weird setup.
Actually, I think Italy and Germany have started allowing private companies to operate on their railways, but I think they need to fit it between the nationalized services. I could be wrong about that tho.
Not really. British railways are 100% nationalised. All privatisation efforts have failed.
I disagree. Aside from privately owned Brightline who already owns the land around their stations, owns their tracks, and has a lot of incentive to expand their coverage, I have not heard of a single other piece of privatized infrastructure that actually benefits the users or actively engages in expansion