Robin Hanson writes, on the Armchair Economists list:
Wouldn’t a privately organized fire department look a lot like a government one, with hoses and fire trucks and all that? Wouldn’t a private school look a lot like a public school, with desks and books and teachers and all that? Yes, of course. Governments aren’t complete idiots; they usually do things that seem at least to the untrained eye remotely similar to the way you’d want to do them to do them right. (Democracies insist on this.)
And of course you don’t want to wait until a fire breaks out to start to organize private responses to a fire. If only governments were able to anticipate problems and build institutions in advance to respond to them, then yes of course government institutions would be much superior in many cases.
But surely private organizations can anticipate problems, and surely the fact that government responses are remotely similar to best responses doesn’t settle the question of whether they are in fact better than private remedies.