Not to get political, but it’s exactly this that makes me wonder if people understand what socialized services will turn into. Do people want DMV-like experiences for _more_ aspects of life?
Just renewed two licenses and two registrations at the "DMV" of my state. Actually just involved going to a kiosk at the grocery store, it took 10 minutes and was completely painless. On the other hand, the private trash company who provides service at my new house still hasn't refunded an overage from 4 months ago after several hours on hold and 4? 5? calls now..
Having terrible service at the DMV is a funding decision, not a necessity, and there's absolutely no guarantee that 'private' actors will be any better.
If you make a service universal you don't have to have that much paperwork. Hell of a lot easier to run a service based on "everyone gets it and we tax richer people more, since they also get it".
Imagine if more services worked like a library rather than the DMV (granted libraries I guess check your address?). Imagine if going to a hospital involved checking your symptoms and not having to negotiate down prices. Imagine everyone having a ~0 cost bank account at the post office. Imagine having any form of recourse beyond posting to a forum thread for an administrative issue.
And you do know that DMVs are miserable because they don't have the budget to be properly staffed right? The pain is self-inflicted. We could give money to governments without profit motives, or we can give money to corporations with profit motives. If it's a service that we actually want in society, the answer seems obvious to me.
The problem is in the incentives of the people who run the service.
Commercial: We run the service for our own profit, so we do all we can for the service to be attractive: fast, easy, affordable enough but not too cheap. We'll walk an extra mile to serve a customer because it will attract more. In a pinch, we might consider using a dark pattern, but we're wary of the potential bad press.
Socialized governmental: We run our service because the state has hired us for that. Some of us see it as a noble way tp serve the public, but most of us are here for the stable salary, benefits, future pension, and a regulated workplace. We're not earning nearly as much as the commercial folks (or we are unionized and earn something closer to the commercial folks). We work by instruction, and instructions explicitly lack any extra mile provisions. We have no need to work faster, or harder, or otherwise do more work when we can do less work without breaking the instructions. BTW if the government pays us too little, we won't hesitate to go on strike; the service will cease temporarily; sorry guys.
Commercial: We are acquired by a large corporation who then destroys the competition by dumping, before axing any "extra mile" and optimizing (skyrocketing) the prices.
Yes, people working in a business are all go-getters who are definitely not just there for the paycheck like those smelly public workers.
Everything you listed could apply in both directions (you think companies don't have incentives to push down worker wages to poverty wages? You think that motivates workers to actually provide good service?) And no, companies (especially larger ones) aren't sitting around thinking about how to make products cheaper for the end user. They're thinking about how to increase their own profits! No capitalist is like "wow I really wish I could offer this at cost".
Incentive structures exist in all places, this is why you can have things like public support for teacher's strikes, tax increases, etc. Because people actually think about this stuff holistically and don't just rely on trite platitudes that they heard from their local libertarian and projecting their own selfishness on everyone else.
Employees may be there for the check only in either case.
The top brass, though, have distinctly different incentives, and this influences how they motivate line workers, and how they structure the service.
BTW large incumbent corporations suffer often from the same disease, because, like with the government, their clients have no effective choice anyway, no need to woo them.
With teachers it's a bit special: just making the conscious effort to become a teacher is a rather strong filter. Similar with librarians, for instance. This is not the same for most governmental clerical services.
This is a non-sequitur; an FCC rule-making is not providing a service like the DMV, it’s lawmaking. Deliberate and thoughtful is not a bad way to make laws.
