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Re:Americans will soon be able to renew passports online by jimkleiber on Friday August 26, 2022 @01:03PM (#32610074)
I assume the myth being that will never be able to provide 'timely and cost-effective services', not that they currently aren't.

If the belief is that there is no way that the government could ever provide good services, then the only solution seems to be to get rid of them and have someone else provide good services. The challenge I see with this solution is that private service providers have a very very strong incentive to get people to believe that this is the only solution: it's hard to compete with an effective monopoly.

If the belief is that they could provide good services, then we might see that maybe they don't provide good services for a number of reasons and try to improve them as well.

Re:Americans will soon be able to renew passports online by galaxyLogic on Friday August 26, 2022 @01:08PM (#32610139)
It could also be that one party WANTS to provide good services while the other party is bought by the private industry and thus never wants government services to be good.

EXAMPLE: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/biden-cannot-fir...

Re:Americans will soon be able to renew passports online by jimkleiber on Friday August 26, 2022 @02:47PM (#32611255)
I agree but maybe could have said it differently:

> The challenge I see with this solution is that private service providers have a very very strong incentive to get people to believe that this is the only solution: it's hard to compete with an effective monopoly.