This is what privatization leads to. Hand off a government function to a profit-seeking organization, well, it's gonna seek profits; the taxpayer winds up paying for the thing and also for someone else to make their profits off the thing.
Seriously has there ever been a situation where privatizing an industry led to actually reduced costs, and didn't lead to reduced quality of output? Even if you accept the (IMHO dubious) premise that private industry is necessarily going to be more efficient than government-run industry, the efficiency gain has to be greater than the profit-taking for it to be a worthwhile tradeoff for the taxpayer.
This is an extremely simplistic way to look at things.
Private organizations do some things much better than public, and vice versa. More often than not it depends on the question you're asking... And there's a lot of contextualization needed in the answer.
How's your electrical infrastructure, or your water infrastructure doing? They're supplied by private industry. How's your religious institution, your school bus, your local day care? What about public-private partnerships, like public transit? Personally, I will take the mixed market universal health care systems of France and Germany, over the 100% public Canadian waiting list system... but that depends on your criteria for success.
Volumes are written about each one of these cases, how to evaluate "success", what combinations of structures work well in what social contexts, etc. Other countries have private companies involved in prisons, and get great results... But their markets are different, their contract terms are different, the avenues of influence for legislation are different, their bidding processes are different, and their cultures are different. To reduce it to "privatization always raises costs and reduces quality of output" is ridiculous.
> Private organizations do some things much better than public, and vice versa.
That is certainly a true statement, and I'm of course by no means suggesting that privately-supplied functions such as "day care" or "religious institutions" should be government-run.
I'm reacting primarily to the current American administration's de facto stance of "small government good, big government bad," which I feel is just as simplistic as the straw-man version of my question you constructed. Privatization efforts have been proposed (or have long since been carried out -- this tendency long predates Trump) for the prison system, the education system, air traffic control, even the military itself through use of mercenary companies like whatever Blackwater's name is now. (There's certainly room for reasoned disagreement about which functions a government ought to serve compared to private industry, but surely "military and jails" belong under the government umbrella?)
In every case I'm aware of, the justification has been that it will reduce costs due to increased efficiency, yet the end results have been increased costs and reduced quality of service. Maybe Americans are just bad at privatization, but that was a genuine question: has there been a case where privatizing a function traditionally served by the government has improved it? The case under discussion here, the american prison system, certainly hasn't.
My main point was this:
> Even if you accept the premise that private industry is necessarily going to be more efficient than government-run industry, the efficiency gain has to be greater than the profit-taking for it to be a worthwhile tradeoff for the taxpayer.
...which seems inarguable, yet is rarely if ever addressed by proponents of privatization.
> which functions a government ought to serve compared to private industry
(For what it's worth, and in case it helps clarify my stance here, my opinion on this is that if it's a necessarily monopolistic or universally-mandated function, it should be part of the government; if it's a function where meaningful competition is possible, let capitalism do its thing.
The goal being to provide some recourse when things go wrong: If my private daycare sucks I can just go to a different one, no problem. If my government prison system sucks I can at least theoretically vote the people responsible out of office. But when there's no opportunity for meaningful choice or competition, there's no benefit to privatization, it's just inserting a middleman who can skim some profit off the top.
This still leaves a lot of important gray area -- education and health care remain thorny issues for example -- but I hope I've demonstrated that I don't hold the simplistic "everything should be government!" stance you appear to have ascribed to me.)
Seriously has there ever been a situation where privatizing an industry led to actually reduced costs, and didn't lead to reduced quality of output? Even if you accept the (IMHO dubious) premise that private industry is necessarily going to be more efficient than government-run industry, the efficiency gain has to be greater than the profit-taking for it to be a worthwhile tradeoff for the taxpayer.