privatize this

I will concede this about privatization: it puts more than one company in a particular market, forcing those companies to compete on price or quality or service, which is ultimately good for the customer. Remember when the government broke up AT&T’s monopoly in the 1980s and you started getting all those annoying telemarketers from Sprint and MCI trying to get you to switch (if you lived in the U.S. at the time)? Yeah, it was a pain in the ass, but now you have cheaper long-distance, or more frequent-flyer miles, or the chance to do some good when you pay your phone bill. There’s something for every market, pretty much. This is good.