How would this work the other way around? The state provides cheeseburgers and fidget spinners until someone writes a law requiring private industry to provide these things? Isn't there a sort of lack of freedom inherent in forcing people to get all their cheeseburgers from a single place?

Private is the default solution for all problems. The state only provides a service when the government takes action to do so, and usually this is on top of whatever existing private infrastructure there is.

This seems like a pretty weird perspective to have?

A mix of public and private can work with proper regulation (especially when combined with state owned private companies).

This article only refers to the US. This is the second time I've brought it up over the last week, but it'd be nice if the US and "the west" weren't constantly conflated.

Not all of us have fucked over their citizens and spiraled into borderline dictatorships that are well on their way to becoming international pariahs as much as the US have.

> It seems insane when you think about it, but that’s what your grandparents voted for.

Our grandparents wanted a nice hospital and that's what they voted for. The people they elected needed funds to build the hospital, so they sought funding. The IMF and World Bank said "sure, we'll help you fund it. But in order to do so, you need to privatize your healthcare industry."

Our grandparents got a nice hospital for a while, the politicians got another 4 years in power, and a few years later we noticed that our free healthcare was gone.

This, multiplied across the entire developing world.