Hi Jock, firstly, thanks for your comment at my place.

I would like to take you up on this admittedly rather unclipped argument:

"real privatisation, so called "liberalisation" of government functions, should mean the state divesting themselves completely from interference in that policy area. For example, just because DVLA contracts out its computer systems and administration does not mean the registration and licensing of vehicles and drivers has been "privatised". Not bothering with a DVLA at all and allowing insurance companies to work out ways of ensuring the drivers and vehicles they are prepared to insure comply with what they consider to be safe would be. i.e. a different way of working, free from government entirely, and open to proper competition where new ideas and ways of achieving similar ends can be developed. Finding new structures, free from the dead hand of government to do the things we need, rather than what politicians think we ought to need."

Firstly, I'd like to ask why private provision of services formerly provided by public institutions is not privatisation if it happens to be a monopoly? Surely the passing from public to private makes this a privatising process regardless of whether the outcome is monopolistic or not? Isn't privatisation about whether property and services are owned privately or not, rather than on the basis of whether or not they truly compete? In any event, this argument is largely a semantic one.

You make the point that the state should completely divest itself of responsibility for given policy areas, rather than just 'outsourcing' them. But at the end of the day, competing DVLA type providers would, competing or not, still have to provide a service which is both mandated and required by force of law. Competing or not, they still perform a politically necessary public function.

For me, the argument is not about whether privatisation or 'corporatisation' will provide a 'better' service, but which will provide a better service within the constraints of what people actually want from it. At this level, the debate, rather than being about ownership, is in fact about control, and is essential to the understanding of contemporary socialist argument. Do we, the public, and/or stakeholders involved, seek to control a measure democratically, or do we seek to do so as individual and isolated customers? Especially, given the nature of this function, when the safety of the public and civil society (rather than exclusively isolated individuals) is at stake, and when market mechanisms cannot necessarily provide wider social imperatives which may exist of be politically desirous, such as progressive pricing mechanisms for driving licenses?

Public or private, these remain important questions, because of the possible different outcomes. In my view, more often than not, market mechanisms put users of services into 'prisoners dilemma' type situations; take selection of schools by families, and selection of families by schools.

Your passport idea seems to me to be a good example of why this would have to fail. The state would only be able to recognise a given set of ideas that conform to publicly acceptable standards; some competing passports would immediately be eliminated from the game, and those which survive would have a strong incentive, and perhaps the revenue, to lobby government to further deregulate, removing public accountability from a process which only existed in the first place to provide a public benefit. Further, there would be collapses, which would disbenefit many ID holders, and where there were not collapses, there would be takeovers, allowing a monopoly to eventually build up.

In my view, the building of such monopolies must be the ends of the competitive process from a director's point of view.

The result, of course, is extortion, which could be circumvented by letting the state fulfil the function under the control of publicly raised political imperative.

One may as well privatise policing (which is in my view consistent with the logic of libertarianism, but capitalism in any sensible guise would not allow itself to become incapable of effective authoritarianism, despite its urge to deregulate and privatise things not totally necessary to guarantee its own continued survival).

Than the former, even.