• Beaver [he/him]
    ·
    4 months ago

    The liberal fascination with private/public partnerships is so odd. There's obviously some brainworm idea that a privatized version of a service will experience market pressures to improve efficiency... but even in their ideal world where that's true why do they think that the profit margin wouldn't swallow up that difference, especially when they never do competitive bidding for services? The Thatcherite vision at least had the consistency of the government completely exiting the field, but the Starmerite vision seems to be the Ultimate Centrist approach of just having the worst of all worlds.

    • NPa [he/him]
      ·
      4 months ago

      I'm sure you're just giving liberal politicians too much credit by assuming that they aren't just craven slugs, willing participants in the hollowing out of society for profit. They don't believe things will get generally better from privatization, they believe things will get better for them specifically.

      Now why the average liberal voter believes in this shit, it's probably just a mix of unconscious anti-communism and unexamined big-brain centrism that dictates that going to far either way would be too 'extreme' so a 'mixed' economy is by definition the best.

      • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]
        ·
        4 months ago

        Remember a LibDem voter telling me nationalizing the trains was bad because it hurts the little guy. Didn’t really go on to explain any further but were adamant about it.

        • NPa [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          4 months ago

          Is his uncle like a 4 foot tall railroad tycoon in a comically oversized tophat or something

          • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]
            ·
            4 months ago

            No. Her family runs some church group in the north of England. She had some weird beliefs. Big Bernie fan but hated Jeremy Corbyn, saying he was like Trump.

    • Dolores [love/loves]
      ·
      4 months ago

      public private partnerships absolve the private of accountability. when full privatization delivers dogshit results there's an obvious pressure to return it to the public sector, with PPP you can change all sorts of things around the margins and switch out contracts without calling the organizational scheme into question