alt Hacker NewsRe: garbage collection, I don't think it's just urban/rural. I've never lived in the suburbs, but I've moved around enough to have experienced both public and private collection in both urban and rural settings. In all cases the quality of service was generally much higher for public garbage collection.
And yeah, similar experience for public vs private power and gas companies. A thing that I think many free market purists forget is that local officials tend to live with the knowledge that they will have hell to pay at the next election if they allow the public utilities to start pissing people off too much.
Yeah, in general, city council members are more accountable than a corporation. I can go to a meeting and yell at them. They're also living with the same service, most of the time, so they have a vested interest in making it a high quality experience. It's certainly possible to imagine bribery and other fuckery going on in local government that would make service worse or more expensive than competition, but corruption is historically pretty rare in the US (though it's been on the rise, as permission has been granted from the top). And, competition is an illusion when it comes to utilities; the competitors are all just competing to take a cut, they're not able to compete on service because they aren't actually the provider.