But democracy is really hard work. The vast majority of people would rather let someone else do it so that they can play with the kids, hang out with friends at the bar, hit the gym, etc. instead. They don't even want to get involved with other democratic concerns, let alone try to watch over capital. And, frankly, who can blame them?

As such, that means that you are still going to need an individual or small group of people to take over the day-to-day control of the means. Congratulations, you just invented "private ownership".

But, it would require putting in the work to make happen. Which they don't want to do. People, and therefore democracies, don't like to put in work unless they absolutely have to. And in this case, why would they have to? There is really no good reason to put in the work. The people that could be recalled are there because the democracy wants them to be. Recalling them for no reason would be kind of silly.

Of course. I even said as much in the previous comment. But I also said there is no reason to put in the work. The work needing to be done was given away to other people for good reason and the democracy wants to keep it that way.

If that changes, things will change, but until then...

I witnessed more than five such privatizations in two different countries and they all ended up with the "investors" not even investing the minimum of what would have been necessary to keep the infrastructure operational. A decade later service quality is abysmal, infrastructure so bad that the state has to come in and help.

And these are only examples from postal services and public transport from the european regions I lived in, but I heard/read similar stories from nearly every of the 27 EU countries. The nations that still have exceptional services are the ones that didn't privatize them.

So if what I said is complete nonsense you surely have no problem pointing me to the wonderland where privatization lead to better services, lower prices and better service coverage — but we both know that never was the true interest behind privatizing anyways, don't we ; )

If you look at the worse services in your country they are usually the worse: from applying for a passport, to filling in pointless forms to high prices. Almost everything is better off in competition than making the natural market illegal.

we could also learn from ideas associated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_economics. I'm not saying they are all good ideas, but they are worth testing out and looking for historical examples of where they worked or failed.

That's a really good way to starve a couple million people. It's quite good to limit the wealth accumulation as well when people are only receiving rations for working from dawn to dusk.

There's a reason society's economic foundation resembles natural selection