Whenever any suggestion is made to privatize any service presently monopolized by the government, the fearmongers immediately warn of rapacious corporate fat cats. If you allow free market competition with open prices, surely greed will lead to abuse and extortion!
I'm not here to argue that executives are saintly paragons of virtue, but such arguments ignore several key factors: Politicians are not immune to perverse incentives, open competition trends toward better goods/services, and the popular account of past "free market failure" is often flat-out wrong. Case in point: Supposedly, London firefighters let buildings burn if they were uninsured. No pay, no spray!
Tom Scott posted a video in December 2022 retracting a now-unlisted previous video based on new information which appears to entirely overturn the oft-repeated lore of callous firefighters watching buildings burn. Lack of water was reportedly more likely than lack of compassion when fires were not put out.
The kicker: Government firefighters actually have applied the "no pay, no spray" policy in recent years. So much for benevolent state bureaucracy, right? But no, that is an unfortunate incident. The folklore of evil business abuses is the only data that matters! Of course, I can't verify any of these reports, but this kind of reexamination does tend to overturn assumptions regarding the nature of government versus the market.
I should also draw a distinction between laissez-faire free market competition with open prices and voluntary exchange of property and/or services and the so-called "privatization" where governments farm out portions of their monopoly to a cartel of cronies. These concepts are not even slightly the same, even though they are commonly conflated under the umbrella term of "capitalism."
Why do people so quickly run away from freedom and toward government? We are accustomed to a tax-funded monopoly in so many essential services, and while people see the waste and abuse in so-called "free-market monopolies," they refuse to even consider the monopolistic nature of political buraucracy, much less question the assertion that markets trend toward monopoly.
