Item — HN Reader

Could you list some examples of where public infra hasn't "gone well"? Because from my own view of things it's the exact opposite, whenever anything became privatized that shouldn't have been (rail, water, electricity, public transportation, healthcare) it inevitably follows the same churn as all the other things getting enshittified continuously.

The national railway in the Netherlands is a great example of this. They've privatized but with gov't subsidies, yet there's less trains, less people getting moved by the remaining trains, ticket prices skyrocketing YoY, worse service, rail workers getting shafted and basically being forced to go on strike in order to improve conditions. They're (NS) a monopoly too and handle something like 95% of all rail traffic within the Netherlands.

I believe the UK is going through a similar issue, where their railways are now privatized and in turn it's lead to increasingly worse service despite there being plenty of competition in the market in the form of many rail companies.

This lolbert fantasy of the "free" market being good for literally everything, including critical public infrastructure is a complete farce.

3 comments

https://chatgpt.com/share/68a37b87-6c30-8002-8a9a-76915e2e48...

The basic problem with the way you are thinking about it with respect to the national railway is that you don't seem to include cost to the government (ie, the people) to run it. Much infrastructure might appear to be "well run" by the government until you see the massive hole in the their budget. Sometimes the service has to get worse. When the government decides some piece of infrastructure must "pay for itself", they often sell it or hand over management to a private entity as a way to shift blame.

There are many private companies/PE firms etc who are competitively bidding to own these assets. It's not some license to print money, they are low return low risk assets.

Erh... if a public service is publically deficit financed (no debts incurred) and not for profit (lower priced) those are two positives, not negatives as your generated answer seems to suggest.

No, it's not positive. It's just a choice - do you want users of said infrastructure subsidized by non-users or not? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.

The railway system in the Netherlands is not privatized. The structure is publicly owned but operated under a concession model where both state-owned and private companies may run services. There are some regional operators that are private companies, but by far the largest part, NS and Pro-rail, are wholly government owned.

I'm not in favor of privatizing a natural monopoly like railway infrastructure, but in the case of NS I'm not sure privatization would be worse than what we have now: "market friendly" salaries for management, and yearly losses go to the tax payer.

That's my mistaken read of the situation in NL then! I'd edit my comment to point this out but am unable to at this point unfortunately :(

Private vs public is just one factor. The UK's rail services improved hugely post-privatisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

Classic British irony.