> but I've seen more and more politicians in the US who support that, or at least that's what I hear when they talk about privatizing education, healthcare, and even the FAA.
We're still losing the distinction between privatizing more things and privatizing everything. I'm not aware of any federal-level US politicians who want to privatize, say, the military.
> but I don't think that's an argument for privatization because at least we try to pretend we hold the government to those standards.
Personally, I'm not interested in the standards we pretend to hold the government accountable to. I'm interested in actual outcomes. If privatizing some service can vastly improve outcomes, then great, if government can do it, then great. Sure, there's the high school social studies explanation that governments are accountable to the people while corporations aren't, but in reality I think that varies vastly from one sector of society to another. Sometimes government accountability to the voting population seems to work, but sometimes it fails miserably. Sometimes corporate accountability from the market seems to work, but sometimes it fails miserably.