There's rarely any political push to privatize things that aren't natural monopolies though, precisely because nobody is going to make bank on that.

In practice almost every privatization is simply an exchange where the new owner pays the government $x to help solve its "debt problem" (because the government may one day be rendered insolvent by running out of the cash it it prints).

Then, the public gets soaked for $nx where n is usually at least > 2 and the government officials behind the privatization get some really lucrative jobs and speaking engagements after they leave office.