The issues in privatisation

The author contends that liberalism does not imply unconditional support for privatisation and that there are ethical issues of market competition that liberal economists usually overlook

Another aspect of the so-called neo-liberal policies involves privatisation. Here also the empirical evidence is mixed. First of all, turning a public monopoly into a private monopoly does not serve the cause either of efficiency or of liberalism. 

Second, the general argument is that large public firms are often too big to fail and the near-certainty that they will be politically bailed out makes them lazy, inefficient and corrupt. But there are also too-big-to-fail private firms, and we know that supposedly efficient financial markets where the threat of takeovers is to discipline the bad-performing private firms often do not work so