Even in markets with competition, competition from the public sector is an excellent way of exerting market discipline on dysfunctional markets.
If you compare the average quality of housing in, for example, Singapore (where 90% of housing is public) and the UK it's like night and day. UK private landlords are among the laziest and most entitled in the entire world, the land use efficiency is terrible and the building quality is abysmal. Thames water wasn't the only victim of the cult of privatization.
Alas, the one UK politician that tried to fix this was treated like the a cross between the antichrist and a terrorist by the UK media oligarchs and that was enough to prevent him from fixing anything.
If anything the NHS is probably in the crosshairs of the investor cult.
My favorite example of this is telecoms in Canada. Both public competition and dysfunctional markets.
Saskatchewan has SaskTel. It’s a public telecom that provides internet (DSL, fiber, wireless)/POTS/cellular. They and their subsidiaries (e.g., SaskTel International) provide all sorts of other services.
When the CRTC removed rules about charging for data overages and things, they didn’t implement any additional charges because their mandate is to serve the people of the province not extract the most profit for shareholders.
They contribute money back into the government coffers every year while also being the sole telecom covering large swathes of the province, working through a FTTH rollout, etc.
When I went to sign up for a cellular plan with a different provider, the person on the phone kept telling me the plan didn’t exist—they had the same plan, but it was $30/mo more than what I was telling them.
Because they had the wrong province selected. All of that provider’s plans were 30-50% cheaper in my province due to the competition from the (profitable) public telecom.
I’ve been away a while, it’s probably gone to shit by now (when I left the government was trying to sell it off for a quick buck _again_), but at the time it was magical to live in the only place in the entire country with an even relatively sane cellular market.
i always cringe when i see Singapore used as a comparison point with developed nations. it's a single city and has an authoritarian government. how is that at all an apples to apples comparison?
Because the reason they implemented the HDB mass housing program had nothing to do with them being authoritarian or a city state. They are just nice commieblocks.
Lee Kuan Yew was afraid of the domestic communist opposition. This was a popular policy of theirs and they were getting dangerously close to power,so he ripped it off. It's a formula for staying in power that served him well.
Back when western leaders were deathly afraid of communists they used to build public housing as well. Then they stopped. Singapore continued.
If you compare the average quality of housing in, for example, Singapore (where 90% of housing is public) and the UK it's like night and day. UK private landlords are among the laziest and most entitled in the entire world, the land use efficiency is terrible and the building quality is abysmal. Thames water wasn't the only victim of the cult of privatization.
Alas, the one UK politician that tried to fix this was treated like the a cross between the antichrist and a terrorist by the UK media oligarchs and that was enough to prevent him from fixing anything.
If anything the NHS is probably in the crosshairs of the investor cult.