Some ideas/direction sought on a piece on privatization I'm working on...

[LAGC]

4. I don't know about U.S. history, but certainly many examples from the old Soviet Union.

As someone else stated so eloquently in another thread: "I don't want the government deciding fashion choices for me, but it would be nice if my utilities were all publicly-owned."

The free market does have advantages when dealing with most commercial products: quickly adjusting to peoples tastes/styles/desires, setting prices based on supply-and-demand, offering more variety and choices, etc.

But on the flip-side, when it comes to human services, most anything dealing with people like health care and especially public safety, the "invisible hand" tends to treat people as expendable commodities and service suffers as a result.

Certainly the privatized prison industry experiment is a glaring example. Private prisons cut costs by paying guards less, serving cheaper food, cutting corners and offering fewer comforts, no surprise that much higher levels of violence and unrest inevitably occur.

Infrastructure (roads/bridges/railways) and the energy sector in general are two other areas where I'm not sure privatization has really helped lower costs -- just made a few fat-cats very wealthy, at the public expense.