Item — HN Reader

> The real problem is public corruption.

So the solution is private corruption where nameless corporations and CEOs get to take public money with 0 oversight instead?

I'm not a yank myself, but in the Netherlands the national railway (NS) is "jointly" owned but run as a private business and is a complete clusterfuck, exactly because we for some insane reason believe that running public transport should be profitable. Prices get raised every year (and we already have some of the most expensive train costs in the world), there's less trains, conductors get paid like shit and treated like garbage (hence them striking often), the trains are late more and more often, they're filthy etc. I don't want to drive, but if me and my partner decide we want to go to a different city by train, it costs us easily double what the equivalent car journey would cost. Of course, if we didn't subsidize cars as heavily as we do that'd probably be a different story, but that's venturing off-topic.

Similarly in the UK, privatization led to nothing but chaos there, and now they're left with ludicrous prices compared to all other modes of transport, because again, things are being run as a private business and they're expecting profits to be made.

Public transport should be a public good, and we should not expect it to be profitable. If it's possible, that's great, but we should aim for quality of service above anything else. How about we instead divert the gigantic chunk of money that goes to maintaining roads and making sure drivers have few inconveniences and instead start investing that in actual public transport instead?

> So the solution is private corruption where nameless corporations and CEOs get to take public money with 0 oversight instead?

Presumably the solution looks something like rounding up all of the public officials who officiated over anything that even hints a whiff of personal advantage and sticking their heads in a guillotine.

> Public transport should be a public good, and we should not expect it to be profitable.

Whether something is profitable or not and whether it's provided by direct government employees or not are two independent things. You could very easily pay a private company to operate a transit system while subsidizing fares with tax dollars.

Meanwhile at some point the government is going to be buying something from the market. If they operate the trains, are they also going to design and manufacture the trains? Are they going to manufacture the steel that goes into the trains? What about the energy used to make the steel, or the trucks used to transport it?

But as soon as you have the government buying something from anyone, you need to start lopping off the heads of the public officials whenever there is anything fishy going on with the bidding process or you get what we've got.