[1] http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/role-of-private-sec... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/world/asia/for-indias-poor...

Meanwhile I'll point out that this sort of disdain coupled with a demand that India accept a Faustian bargain ("Who could possibly be against this?", as Zuck says) is exactly what prompts people to think of this perspective as a variation of the "White Man's Burden".

I reject the idea that if someone comes up with a plan for a country, upon turning it down the country has to provide an immediate substitute. If I say highly-polluting cars are affordable and will give more people mobility, it doesn't mean opponents have to immediately provide less-polluting cars at the same price.

My arguments about the power of the free market are not limited to India or any particular country. I preach the same for America. The American government is incompetent and is holding back growth.

Subsidies preserve broken business models at great cost to not just taxpayers, but economic efficiency and quality of service. They create and perpetuate structural deficiencies in the economy. They reward political rent-seeking instead of creating real value for people.

As they pile up, the cumulative effect becomes worse and the ability of society to change its mind erodes. At an extreme, when subsidies drive a huge portion of economic activity, returning to a free market requires years of painful readjustment.

The great thing about business is also one of the worst things about it. Profit drive is a very powerful optimization force, and we owe to it most of the wealth around us. It's great when it kind of follows along the lines society wants it to. But, as you said, it has essentially no reason to keep doing that, and so when being horrible and evil is more profitable, the business turns horrible and evil and that's where we need the government - an agent that does not follow the same incentive gradient - to step in and force that business to behave.

The market is like a great river. It's simple - it flows downhill. Put an obstacle on its way, and the river shall destroy it or route around it. But just as majestic and life-giving it is, it can equally easily take lives away. It will flood villages and cities without stopping. Governments are like people tasked with landscaping. They don't have the power of the river. But they can put things on its path to redirect it - whether away from settlements in danger, or towards a barren land, or straight into a power plant that will help feed millions.

We need both.

I agree that we need both. Basic research is a good example. I'm not familiar with the economics of electric cars, but you might be right about Tesla too. But beware the easy incrementalism of this all. Each step is logical and difficult to oppose on its own, but the collective result is a society drained of its dynamism and freedom. And then the real kicker is that the government programs that you sacrificed them to don't work. They become barriers to entry for competition, vehicles for political pork, permanent bureaucracies that lobby for their own existence, and more opportunity to waste other people's money.

As an aside, businesses do have a very good reason to continue to serve the public interest: they need to continue to create value for their customers, or they soon won't have any.

(And no, disbanding all governance will not make power spread itself evenly among everyone - it's not a stable state. We'd be back to having warlords instead.)

RE Tesla, they took some DOE loans (inb4 someone pops up with "evil Musk eating taxpayer money" again - loans which they paid back in full and way before the due time) that were important to their growth. It's a textbook example of why those loans, and other grants, exist in the first place.

I agree that all the problems you mentioned are real and important. Governments do create nasty issues. But they handle some things well. Markets too have issues, just different ones, and also have terrible failure modes in other areas (which include bribing governments into changing laws to benefit them instead of the general population). Personally, I'm advocating for dropping the ideological approach and just evaluating every problem on its own, whether it is solved best by top-down governance, bottom-up free market work, or some combination of both.

Private schools exist from an aristocratic history. England has this nonsense also. Meanwhile there are countries who take public education seriously and there is essentially no such thing as private education. Look at how Scandinavian countries do this. And the Germans are offering U.S. college students free degrees, many of them stay in Germany. And by and large the education level in these countries is more uniform, where in the U.S. it's again, quite classist.

So if you're in favor of feudalism, yeah private school is a great idea.

As for Free Basics, I think it's for the users to decide whether it meets their needs or not, but for that to be possible Facebook shouldn't be referring to what they offer as an essential service. Facebook itself is not essential. A full, unabridged Internet connection, is essential. But that's not what's offered. Further, the connection with the user requires dual certificates, so Facebook can see what everyone's doing even if they aren't using Facebook proper - something an ISP doesn't even get to do. The harm is the obfuscation.

Who funds education can and should be a separate argument from who runs the schools.

And maybe the fiercest and bitterest war waged in state politics over the last decades were about school systems.

In Hamburg there are mostly comprehensive schools. In the largest state, Northrhine-Westphalia, there are still those separate tiers, but comprehensive schools are probably the majority.

Jurisdictions are moving toward charter schools because their teachers are not unionized, and can therefore be paid less salary and benefits than public school teachers, with the side “benefit” of breaking public schoolteachers unions. Additionally, charter schools help rich white people redirect their tax money away from funding public schools in poor brown neighborhoods. Finally, charter schools are much less regulated w/r/t the salaries they pay their management or the services they purchase from other firms, which makes them a booming profit center, and gives plenty of slush to spend on lobbying, bribes, and PR/marketing.

Alternet isn’t the most neutral source, but check out this lengthy piece for a decent rundown of some of the sources of profit in the charter school world: http://www.alternet.org/election-2014/who-profiting-charters...

I think there's problems with that narrative too. The impact that good teachers can have on kids from very troubled homes is probably overstated, and teachers unions have often been fighting against performance rating systems that unfairly ignore that. But in defense of charters, a performance rating system that doesn't work won't survive very long in the private sector.

Edit: Perhaps a better question, that avoids the nasty politics of the current situation, is: what does the ideal system look like? My inclination is that it would look more like charter schools than like public schools.

The precise policy details might not apply in extremely different societies/political systems, but the high-level goals should be the same:

Highly qualified professional teachers with good career prospects and lots of personal responsibility and a culture of continuous professional development, adequate school infrastructure and materials, focus on the individual needs of diverse children, resource equality for students regardless of wealth or social class, work to solve child poverty and other severe social problems that prevent any education system from functioning.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...

"...teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. "

"All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher."

"If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it."

"In Finland parents can also choose."

But it may be that the finnish model is slipping anyway:

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/06/is-finland-a-choice-les...

"Finnish eighth-graders today perform slightly lower than seventh-graders did in 1999."

I give them two decades.

Some charter schools. A minority. Others are run like tiny military academies, or have gone all-in on high-stakes testing, or profit by relying on low-paid short-term teachers with high turnover, or are mainly financial schemes/scams with schools attached (cf. the alternet link a few posts upthread).

All of the bits you listed actually sound precisely like my southern California suburban public elementary school experience in the mid–late 1990s. Unfortunately the school got constant pushback from the school district and state for not being excited enough about letter grades or standardized tests, but was able to mostly persist its culture through support from local parents.

The hard work, mediocre pay compared to alternative professions, and lack of autonomy and social respect they receive takes its toll though, and teacher attrition is higher than ever. Instead of “playing chicken” as you suggest, experienced teachers are retiring in droves and top potential teachers are scared away by poor career prospects, and as a profession teaching is hollowing out. Most states cut education budgets sharply after the 2008 recession and in general those budgets still haven’t recovered. I fear that in another decade or two public education will be in a very tough place, having lost a huge proportion of its human capital with no easy way to get it back. In parts of the US this is already a crisis, but the political response has been to further demonize teachers and push for more standardized testing, voucher programs, charter schools, and so on.

Even if states cut education budgets sharply in 2008 it shouldn't have been a problem, because it's not like teachers 30 years before that were suffering under much more parsimonious spending. It's just that when they cut those budgets, someone decided to pass the pain on to the teachers instead of figuring out where the real waste was.

The atrocious thing is that the teacher's unions keep clamoring for more educational spending instead of higher teacher pay. Empirically speaking in the US, more educational spending will correlate with lower teacher pay.

Mark Zuckerberg's Op/Ed piece[1] specifically makes the case that Free Basic's is valuable likening it to public healthcare, public education, and public libraries.

So yes, private good. But private also is private, and not beholden to the public. Free Basics isn't private, though Zuck et al would like it to be accepted and lauded as a public service.

[1] http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/free-...

Unless we're talking about B-corp's [1], such a philosophy is not compatible with the legal responsibility a corporation has to its shareholders.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

An advertising giant offering "free internet" with the ability to MITM and track https connections is hardly charity.

It makes the entire technological infrastructure of the country grow crooked, relying on a particular corporation as backbone, rather than growing their own.

Because "market solutions" demonstrably fail in the presence of externalities, esp. for public goods.

Besides market equilibria are provably intractable in the general case anyway... (Unless P = NP, that is).

The case is entirely opposite in higher education. People swear by public institutes and universities and private institutes (barring a few big ones) are looked down upon because they have historically charged more for a lesser education compared to the highly subsidized and excellently staffed public universities.

The question, if we can agree the open network is something desirable, is will this initiative help the population get Internet access sooner or later? My bet would be later, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

My only question...would Americans think it would be wise to destroy Net Neutrality?? Just asking. Perhaps someone should try and get Facebook to start this in USA.