You pop into a conversation about private industry vs government and insist that government organizations have often been much better historically, but they're underfunded now so they're all suffering. Then someone points out that one of your examples is grossly terrible and has always been terrible, and you retreat back to a nearly-meaningless interpretation of your argument: "Oh, I wasn't saying we should actually have the government run things, I just wanted to say that possibly there have been good government bureaus at some point in the past! If you very carefully cherry-pick just the right instant in time and space!"
To that, all I can say is ".. OK"
I don't think you set out to be a troll or anything, and the post office is a pretty good example of exactly what you're trying to say. But you're getting really combative and watering down your core argument that "The Government CAN get things done and has in the past" by attacking people in defense of the nearly-universally-hated VA
I think you're actually trying to hold me to a more precise standard than I ever set out to say. It's like strawmanning my argument. I don't know where my being called combative is coming from; I'm merely pointing out that I never said the things that are being argued against.
Regarding public transportation, for instance: New York's MTA receives about half of its financing as a subsidy. London Tube is a statutory corporation, and can cover only 90% of its expenses from fares. Tokyo Metro is a private entity that shows a healthy profit, and Moscow metro also used to be profitable for a long time. Both Moscow and Tokyo underground infrastructure and service at least are not inferior to NYC's and London's (from my personal experience with 3 of the 4 of them).
If you disallow the government to pay its bills, or effectively haggle, or build the kind of teams it needs, of course it will do a bad job. Meanwhile lots of countries have shown you can have in house teams in the government who make great things.
People will say "the government can't do anything" while cashing their social security check, after driving on the federal highway, drinking their usually clean water, and yelling at their kid's teachers for stupid reasons. We have had 60 years of starve the beast, this was all intentional.
The real question I think is whether there are examples where larger companies gain efficiencies, and if the most efficient way to do something is at a national or international scale, do you want to depend on a massive private companies (likely heavily subsidized) to do it?
That's not handing a public function to the private sector for the sake of finding efficiencies or to fund emergent innovation through competition, that's handing risk-free concessions to a cronies.
It was on HN just two months ago. The One Tiny Law That Keeps Amtrak Terrible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34336653
Most of Amtrak’s service runs on track they don’t own, at the mercy of the freight railroads for scheduling and track maintenance.
They are pressured to keep their long distance trains that lose money as a public good, but they aren’t given consistent public funding in return. We treat them as a company that should turn it own profit. We don’t expect the DOT to turn a profit on highways, because we recognize the greater economic impact of having useful highways.
The Northeast Corridor is the exception and notably seems to be the best performing part of the Amtrak network.
Seems to me like the standard American public-private practice of privatizing the gains and socializing the losses, and then complaining about how the government loses money.
And, interestingly, the worst part of the Northeast Corridor is the part that's not owned by Amtrak (the Metro North territory between NYC and New Haven).
It isn't only the US that suffers from this. The UK has a bad case of it and even Norway is in danger of doing it.
It's true that Amtrak isn't all that useful beyond the NE corridor, although that's as much a function of the scale of the US as of Amtrak itself.
Competition between the two should lead to an equilibrium between organizational bloat and profit taking.
Here is the thing: commercial companies have incentive to stay efficient as long as there is viable competition from a public agency, which provides a baseline in terms of cost and quality.
As soon as public agencies are out of the picture, then there is little incentive for private companies in staying lean and efficient: Why deliver what you promised when you can go over-budget? The threat that an expensive project will be left unfinished gives you leverage to ask and approve excess costs. Why compete with other companies when you can collude with them and laugh together on your way to the bank?
Asking unironically, because in a monopsony situation when there's only one buyer, a state or federal agency, commercial companies compete in materially different ways than in a free(r) market.