this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
706 points (96.8% liked)

Asklemmy

43970 readers
1187 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

NoYeah no. Get out of US bubble.

Private and public are both viable models of operations with some applicability overlap. Private doesn’t necessarily pursue profit first, despite US literally enforcing it.

Basic needs that are either unchanging or change very slowly are the purview of public policy. Healthcare, infrastructure, etc. Privatize it and you’ll have a catastrophe.

Basic needs that benefit from variation and supply elasticity with a necessary baseline is where hybrid model works well. Public entrepreneurship provides variation, regulations or public enterprises cover baseline. Agriculture is a great example of such overlap. Private-only agriculture leads to profiteering on basic human need. Public-only agriculture leads to famines due to incompetence, malice, or lack of elasticity.

Desires that people can live without and can change on a whim is where private innovation thrives. Be it a product to sell or a charity project to pursue. Some of the results of said innovation can and will become matters of public interest. Forbid private enterprise here, and you’ll end up in a bleak reality of North Korea.

We literally had a case of “public everything” half a century ago and it didn’t fucking work. It needed serfdom and insane amounts of natural resources to prop itself up. It also left a mafia-led capitalism in its wake.

We also have a live case of blind trust in markets, as if information was immediately available everywhere. It leads to a very similar looking outcome.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sadly one of the main exports of the US is its ideology, so many other countries want to implement the same heartless, profit-oriented privatizations of every state organism.