They don't make any money unless they give the customers what they want, that's the whole point. It's so basic even animals have an instinct for it. That's why government and private business shouldn't be mixed.
I nominate his doorstep, since who is he to tell us where to poop?
That's because it's a more general category, not because it's a better category. Going the other way: privatisation can for example invest money up front to make operations cheaper.
That example does result in "better at making money" but that money can then be used to lower prices / increase quality / pay shareholders dividends / pay employees higher wages.
Out of these, we often just see
> can then be used to…pay shareholders dividends
During the welfare capitalism of the early 20th century, we did see lower prices, higher quality products, and higher wages. Then Jack Welch and his ilk discovered that you could axe entire departments, lay off thousands of workers, and pay that money to shareholders while your company crashes and burns.
Why invest in making better products than “the commies” if you can make cheap products on par with imports and fire factory workers/QA/research? They learned that if the consumer doesn’t have a competitive choice for a product that will break in 1 year vs one that will last decades, then why not sell 10s of the cheap one over and over?
"Often" seems like weasel words? Look at e.g. tech worker salaries rocketing up. Or the year on year improvements in key items such as cars and phones.
What you're saying doesn't jibe with my understanding of the 20th and 21st centuries' explosion of innovation and quality of life improvements.
If you think Fords and VWs are no better than Ladas, or SpaceX rockets aren't better than Soyuz rockets, or people flock to countries run by "the commies" vs, say, the US, due to the better products and wages in said "commie" countries, then we might just have a fundamental disagreement on the state of reality. But my understanding is the opposite is true.
> why not sell 10s of the cheap one over and over?
Companies can do that, but in a decent economic environment a competitor or twelve can spring up and offer products at different prices and levels of quality. E.g. not every restaurant is McDonald's. Why is that?
That’s not to say that good jobs and food companies don’t exist, as you pointed out we have tech jobs that lay well and other sectors. The divide between what’s achievable for the middle and lower class now vs the upper is staggering though. Having to worry about affording a mortgage, health care, food, etc is a reality for many Americans while a handful simply have to say what they want and they have it without batting an eye or considering the cost.
We can both pick and choose which sectors to look at to support either the idea that jobs are great or that wages are bad, my point is that there has been a very tangible shift for a decent number of companies to move away from good wages and benefits to giving C-levels and shareholders more money than they know what to do with.
/extracting/. Efficient at /extracting/ money. This is the metric that is being rewarded, and therefore this is what gets optimised. You also see this pattern when an asset stripping firm buys an ordinary competitive free market company and runs it into the ground. To align this with /making/ money, just having a free market isn't enough - the controlling entity has to be in it for the long term, and has to bear responsibility for the downside of any decisions it makes. Otherwise it's just plunder and flee, just as with the usual kind of private equity firm corporate raid.
Right, but efficient at what? The answer is almost invariably 'efficient at making money' - that's the whole point; competition normally forces alignment of incentives, wherein 'better' service (for some value of 'better') results in higher income. Thus a business that provides better service is more efficient at making money - the free market hypothesis. When there is a captive audience, as in the case of public utilities, there is no incentive to provide a better service, but the company goal is the same - make the most money - and they are freed up to do it in the easiest way possible, usually by cutting costs across the board and paring down the services to a bare minimum. This is still efficient in the sense that they maximise income for minimum outlay, but it's not in any way desirable for the customers who are forced to use the now crappy service.