I noticed that on Radley's site he's arguing that the solution for bad service is privatization.

I just got off the phone after my usual hour-long voice menu/hold/wrong department/hold/temp-outsourced-trainee conversation with one particular necessary-but-privately-held service (no point in distinguishing them, they're all the same).

The private sector is worse than the public sector will ever be at customer service. Yes, there are occasional jerks in public service. But corporations have a fiduciary obligation to be jerks -- being anythign but jerks will cost more money.

The only reason we feel like service in the private sector sometimes seems more responsive is that a large number of private sector "customer service" is actually sales, disguised as customer service so they can catch you with your guard down. Whenever you want *real customer service*, in other words, help with something you've already paid for but are having problems with, it's almost always worse than government service.

Mr. Balko's worship of corporate ideas of customer service shows that he hasn't spent nearly enough time on the phone to Bangalore. Try supporting enough computers and DSL service at multiple locations.

This is of course only one example of the falsity of this argument. A while ago I had a mother and mother-in-law who were both terminally ill and died within 10 months of each other. I dealt with private insurance companies , Medicaid and Social Security. The government beat the private sector by a mile in politeness and efforts to help. The private company had made a paperwork error and had no interest in fixing it because drawing it out meant that they could keep the money longer. The private sector CAN get away with it because the idea that we can really shop around for every service we receive on a meaningful basis as a rational person with all of the information needed to make a decision is a delusion of the First Church of Free Market.

Try being a college student returning from an involuntary deployment with the Army Reserve. The federal and state levels, still, have little to no idea how to deal with returning veterans who are not transitioning from active duty. I'm personally wrangling, with the help of my State Representative, with some Indiana grant agencies to help prevent other soldiers/students such as myself from getting bilked of thousands of dollars of funding, and from being insulted and treated downright despicably in the act. I don't really know if privatizing the agency would help much though.