Earlier quoted context omitted.
Privatization just means that if you were interested in the outcome before (having water), they are now interested in the money that can be extracted from it. And that means their interest is to but a modern branding onto an operation that has been stripped for wires as long as it works. I grew up during a privatization wave in my country and the promise of the proponents always was that private ownership means waste…
The "waste" argument is standard neoliberal nonsense. There are very few situations where the private sector provides a better service for less money. (See also the UK's NHS, which still provides a very efficient - if increasingly broken - service, while being starved of cash.) Like most neoliberal nonsense, it's not just a lie, it's a misdirection. What it really means is "Government money is being spent on providin…
The issue is when there is a monopoly. When you have a government monopoly of a specific industry, it's going to be poor. If the same thing happens in private industry, it's a similar outcome. There is no competition with the government, because they play by rules that makes it impossible to compete as a private business, so it's by default, a monopoly.
When companies compete, it's always better for the customer. Government run Internet (which is what we had before it was commercialized), was stuck in the same place for decades, with no innovation. It's pretty much universal and relatively cheap now.
In the US, you can look at the post office and private companies like UPS and Fedex. I used to run a business for almost a decade where I would ship out 100s of packages/week. The post office always had poor service compared to the rest...and the cost ended up being comparable. If you lost a package? with the post office, there was no real way to get your money back.
There's waste with government-run services because they never have to really worry about profit or losing money. Every government-run service I've ever used has been inefficient.