I'm German and I can tell you that the state-owned vs private discussion is quite complex. In Germany the train, post service, telephone/internet, and many more things were state-owned not to long ago (about 20-25 years most of them). Nowadays many of them are private. The train is expensive, run down and horribly unreliable. The CEOs have salaries going up to almost a million Euros per year. Our health system is the 2nd most expensive one in the world and it's quite a shit-show. Mobile internet is expensive, even though there is some competition in that market.

There are simply things that shouldn't be optimized to make the biggest profit but to profit the people! Education, health and housing are good examples.