Look, I actually argue for social safety nets. I believe government's role can be defined simply as "ensure that the minimum expectations of society are met", with the full understanding that these expectations (running potable water, medical advances, etc.) increase over time and vary from place to place. I am totally fine with decentralizing government functions to the point of neighborhoods – many of you know that I'm in favor of more decentralization in general.
However, even someone like me can say this article falls far short of supporting its audacious title. It's mostly a paean to Keynes and his concepts. In addition, it contains some fallacies:
But, if the government covers the costs of the service, why not provide it itself? Why spend the time and money forming the partnership, and monitoring its outcomes, if it is going to pay for what is done anyway.
Because when providers compete, quality goes up and costs go down. (On the other hand, when buyers compete, costs go up, which is why single payer systems lower costs.)
The answers to these questions center on the greater efficiency of private enterprise and the consequent cost savings of public-private partnerships. Yet, studies of their use in infrastructure investment provide little support for this presumed cost saving
Compare the VA to Medicare.
Yet, many besides the users of a road benefit from it – the businesses on its route to name just a few. These would be hurt along with its users if its tolls reduced traffic flows, so that while tolls can be charged, and the maintenance expense of the road depends on its use, fees for its use must not impede its use.
Well, as Hayek argued, everyone setting their own prices is a far superior system than central planning to set the price of a toll. And whoever would maintain a road would obviously want maximize their wealth by maximizing the number of cars that go through without a slowdown. They would not likely ignore the long tail of cars any more than, say, mobile phone companies ignore consumers who can "only" pay $20 a month.
In short, this is a terrible reason not to have private ownership . In fact, by being a smaller, private organization, they might have moved faster to install EZPass - like solutions, as AT&T predicted back in the 1990s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PJcABbtvtA)
Much better reasons include simply the guarantee I stated above: people expect to be able to access lots of roads, so they have to be public as a matter of policy. Another reason is standardization: they can expect roughly the same road rules on all roads. And so on.
Perhaps as technology improves, more things can be decentralized and privatized. Self-driving cars can perfectly adapt to local road rules. Communities will be able to install their own wordpress-like government systems that would handle voting, taxation, safety nets, single payer systems etc.
Governments are just management teams of organizations. That's all. Parks in a mall open to all visitors are not much different than public parks. Same goes for community rooms in a co-op.
Recessions can be most easily fixed by giving money to the consumers, to spend on what they need, thereby "voting with their wallet". This is basically "single payer systems" or UBI.
Here is a great debate on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk