I agree they should be stopped. Can they be safely stopped? Not if you are a farmer who benefits from subsidies. There would be winners and losers from the end of farm subsidies (in countries that have them).

As far as I am aware we don't have far subsidies in Australia but we do have a heavily subsidised automotive manufacturing industry. If subsides were stopped a lot lot of people would lose their jobs.

*farm subsidies

I understand, spyman, and thanks for that. But such a measure would also liberate money to give to tax payers to spend at their discretion, opening up new economic opportunities.

Privatise defence, privatise the railways, privatise healthcare, privatise schools, privatise local govt, privatise the police force and the military. The rationale behind this is that capitalism is a cheaper and more efficient way of running any organisation and therefore exposing all of these sectors to market forces will save billions of dollars and everything will be better run and more efficient and cheaper. The national debt will be paid off and the free market capitalism will reign, all other countries will see how efficient it is and they too will adopt the system saving billions, the world will recover from its economic slump and we will all live in a global age of prosperity.

Nationalise defence, nationalise the railways, nationalise healthcare, nationalise schools, nationalise local govt, nationalise the police force and the military. The rationale behind this is that socialism is a humanist and more ethical way of running any organisation and therefore removing all of these sectors from market forces will remove profit incentives and everything will be slightly less efficient and focus on standards and be cheaper. The national debt will be paid off and the free market capitalism will end, all other countries will see how GDP does not bring happiness and they too will reject the system saving billioons of lives, the world will recover from its spiritual slump and we will all live in a global age of morality.

Privatised healthcare isn't all that popular in the UK, even though only small areas of the NHS have been privatised. Care homes are a good example, and the seemingly constant stream of scandals involving cruel workers tormenting mentally disabled people isn't something that makes me particularly fond of private care homes.

Another example would be dentists. The NHS run some dentists, and others are private. The NHS dentists are much cheaper, and I've never had any trouble with an NHS dentist, so they're not low quality. They couldn't get away with it. Makes me wonder why part of the dentalcare system is privatised at all, except to grab money from people who aren't aware of where the nearest NHS dentistry is to them.

"The rationale behind this is that socialism is a humanist and more ethical way of running any organisation and therefore removing all of these sectors from market forces will remove profit incentives and everything will be slightly less efficient and focus on standards and be cheaper."

Everything will be slightly less efficient if it is nationalised.
Now there is an interesting statement & assumption.
I've got this idea in my head that efficiency is more a product of good management than good ownership ...... when did 'good ownership' make a person better at their job?

I personally find national defense to be too privatized, NigeeBaby. I believe it would be healthier, in principle, for a society if we had conscripted armies in the west. Sending "the boys" to Iraq changes entirely when the chance of one of these politicians being the mom or dad of these boys becomes larger.

Okay well let's take an example - utility companies.

At the moment in the UK, the utility companies are monopolised by 3 or 4 major competitors who all regulate their prices mutually. These companies all make turnovers in the billions and yet our pensioners struggle to meet bills that are rising rapidly over inflation (sometimes around 10% a year at the moment). This is clearly a service that is essential, and yet consumers have no choice around which company they buy utilities from (they are essentially the same company with a different logo, as all prices and offers are maintained in accordance with each other). This is not free market capitalism but a controlled market capitalism.

If nationalised, we will see inefficiences similar to the NHS - worse customer-service for example, as less money will go into it, and less marketing, lack of a proper organisation, with lots of bureacracy and a billion departments that don't communicate with each other. I've worked in several nationalised organisations and they are all grossfully inefficient.

But it would be cheaper, fairer, and wouldn't exploit people by taking their wages off them in what I see as a mandatory service (it is essentially a tax). You can't choose not to have utilities or to buy with someone else.

Essentially we'd be trading a nationalised utility service owned by corporations to a nationalised utility service owned by the same entity that collects taxes. The key difference being that one can reinvest the profit back into lowering prices and providing better services, and one can cash it in to pay off the top executives.

"If nationalised, we will see inefficiences similar to the NHS - worse customer-service for example, as less money will go into it, and less marketing, lack of a proper organisation, with lots of bureacracy and a billion departments that don't communicate with each other. I've worked in several nationalised organisations and they are all grossfully inefficient."

Are you blaming poor ownership or poor management for inefficiencies in nationalised organisations ..... or just making a general assumption that any organisation nationalised will always be less efficient than a privately owned one?

A general assumption based on my experience of public-sector work. That said, maybe it's just Her Majesty's Government that sucks. I don't know about any other countries, but in the UK nationalisation = inefficiency, but I'd say it's ineffeciency worth paying.

Nationalisation is only inefficient when run by people who have no idea what they're doing. Which is sadly all too common. Run by people who actually have experience in the industry and I'm fairly sure it would be at least close to on par with privatisation.

And of course, not all private companies are efficient either.

NigeeBaby, are you serious about a privatised police force? How could that possibly work? Or would poor people be denied justice completely?

Presumably, being a free-market economy there would be multiple police forces competing with each other. Would they all be operating on the same turf?

Or are your referring to a situation where a private company would tender for the job of the police force for a city for a designated period (five years for example)? Much like a private company in some cities look after the suburban train network. For example in Melbourne, Metro Trains (MTR Corporation) took over from Connex (Veiola Transport).

A fully privatised military is a pretty scary prospect. Some billionaire with his own private highly equipped highly disciplined army? That's a ticking time bomb.

Institutions that are tied towards the running of the state, or defending the state, shouldn't be privatised ever. Would you privatise the courts? Or even the government itself? Highest bidder gets to run the country for 5 years?

If we assume that in very simple terms an organisation is made of people, processes and some kind of physical/technical infrastructure.
Regardless of ownership surely the rules around organisational and management efficiency are the same for everyone. People can benchmark and copy good practice from industry to industry, this happens all of the time.
You seem to be suggesting that people and machines will somehow better/more efficient just by the very nature that the organisation is privately owned.
I'm not sure if that argument holds up in theory, if in practice evidence suggests that to be the case I would suggest that it is the management of the organisation that is failing and not the owners. Therefore nationalised industries could be as efficient as privately run industries if they were managed as well.

"You seem to be suggesting that people and machines will somehow better/more efficient just by the very nature that the organisation is privately owned."

That's what I've seen, time and time again.

"I'm not sure if that argument holds up in theory, if in practice evidence suggests that to be the case I would suggest that it is the management of the organisation that is failing and not the owners. Therefore nationalised industries could be as efficient as privately run industries if they were managed as well."

Indeed, that's what I said. Nationalised companies are often run by committees of people who have no experience and no idea what they're doing. That's the key flaw in them. Admittedly privatised companies would probably cut costs more to get higher profits while nationalised companies would tend to have higher costs to keep the workers happy, but if a factory has an extra 100 workers because it's nationalised, and each are recieving £25,000 per year then that's 2.5 million extra in costs per year. Which is probably less than the combination of huge bonuses given to most executives of private companies.

NigeeBaby I see I must have misunderstood your first post in this thread. You were being ironic.

" People can benchmark and copy good practice from industry to industry, this happens all of the time."

People can adopt good practice it is true. But they need to be motivated to do this. The competition amongst private companies provides this motivation. Also it is not always apparent what is good practice until we see it succeed in comparison to other practices. But if everything is owned by the government you don't get to see these alternate strategies.

Ok, so what is the difference that makes the difference.
If we can study what makes a privately owned company more efficient than a publicly owned one, surely we can make organisations efficient regardless of ownership.
Is it the failure to understand this basic difference that has made public ownership less popular? And if we can identify these differences we can overcome them making nationalised industries more efficient and more attractive as a means of managing both private and public assets and resources.

Things I've noticed Nigee:

1. Public-sector organisations don't fire people if they are lazy or don't turn up to work
2. Public-sector employees are paid less and are thus less motivated
3. Public-sector organisations are divided into many seperate sub-organisations that liaise with each other very poorly
4. Public-sector organisations employ many chairpeoples who seem to constantly discuss new 'initiatives' without creating real tangible change
5. Public-sector organisations have very tight budgets and thus purchase the lowest-bidder software, machinery etc which is inefficient
6. Any budget that is left at the year-end is removed as surplus so these companies tend to waste money to justify their budget (new office equipment for everyone!

Basically rather than profit they are competing for funding, and this means spending as much as possible rather than earning as much as possible. In the public sector, inefficiency pays.

"If we can study what makes a privately owned company more efficient than a publicly owned one, surely we can make organisations efficient regardless of ownership."

The key words are motivation and diversity. This is what is lacking in purely government owned enterprises (especially government monopolies).

"People can adopt good practice it is true. But they need to be motivated to do this. The competition amongst private companies provides this motivation."
Are people motivated to find good practice because they are privately owned or how they are personally incentivised, not just in monetary terms.
There are lots of people who do what they do as a job because it is a vocation, they enjoy it, they are good at it, they take pride in it and they gain social status from it, and not just because it earns them the maximum amount of money they could ever earn. This is quite important to know and understand this when employing human resource.

@Nigee,
I believe most economists agree is that the thing that makes privately owned companies more efficient is the fact that they are privately owned. The pressure that the market, and competing companies, exert on an individual company forces the company to adapt, or to simply cease to exist. It is this survival instinct, that government owned companies don't have, that is responsible for their better functioning.

I think also in a free-market we see natural selection at work. Let's say we company a, b and c and each of them are considering various strategies. Maybe none of them know for sure in advance whether a particular management strategy will succeed, but each has to come with something. Company a for example invests heavily in hiring the best staff, company b aims to ruthlessly cut costs, and company c invests in heavily automation. Each strategy has its merits. The only way to know for sure which strategy will succeed is to let a, b and c fight it out in the market. There isn't necessarily a sure fire formula that we can always apply in order to guarantee success. But in a diverse market, one lucky company might stumble upon a winning strategy, that works in that market at that time.

"I believe most economists agree is that the thing that makes privately owned companies more efficient is the fact that they are privately owned. The pressure that the market, and competing companies, exert on an individual company forces the company to adapt, or to simply cease to exist."
Some of our biggest most strategic privately-owned industries like oil companies and energy suppliers collude to reduce competition and maximise profits, not maximise efficiencies. Banks manipulate market prices and get up to all sorts of corrupt practices, not to be more efficient but to be more profitable.
Is it true that privately owned always seek to be super-efficient, think of where you work, companies are judged by profits and not efficiency. In times of lower growth companies cut costs, make people redundant, reduce investments; not to become more efficient but to become more profitable.
What economic theory says you get more efficient by getting rid of resources .......

Economics isn't an exact science Nigee. You can't predict the stock market by using an algorith. It's more a sort of astral mist that contorts itself over time..

Take electricity. As a consumer, you can do a hell of a lot about reducing electricity dependence. Isolation of the house, working by daylight (see earlier thread), turning of the ever-turned-on television. Change to energy-saving lightbulbs. If you use your laptop and telephone for work purposes also: then that's where you charge their batteries. You can install solar panels in your garden. Here's a fun one: install both a gas and an electric cooking device.

So how much electricity do you really need? How much water do you really need? How much health care do you really need?

"In times of lower growth companies cut costs, make people redundant, reduce investments; not to become more efficient but to become more profitable.
What economic theory says you get more efficient by getting rid of resources ..."

You get more efficient my allocating resources in the best way. Thus if a particularly industry finds that demand for its products is falling, it makes sense to shift resources away from that product and into another product. Unfortunately in the short term we get economic pain, especially for workers who have just been made redundant.

Imagine the transition from the horse and carriage to the automobile. Carriage makers would have found sales were gradually falling. Early one one strategy might have been to cut costs and attempt to lower the price of their product in order to regain some demand. As time went on though almost everyone in that industry would have lost their jobs. But in the long term new jobs were being created in the automobile industry.

This transition is a not necessarily smooth. Companies may try to be more efficient, for example, outsourcing to developing countries but then later discover that this strategy may create a new set of problems. For example my company is gradually getting rid of all of its IT staff. Issues that we previously dealt with by an IT guy in the office are now being handled out of India. But sometimes this doesn't work. If the computers go down and no one fixes for six hours we lose money. It can be a false economy.