> Just browsing the comments on this one, it struck me how users of this website, an incubator for new technologies and ostensibly private businesses, seems to not believe in the capacity of private businesses to provide the most socially-useful goods and services.

I've spent my entire life watching private shareholders rape companies sold off by successive Conservative governments.

I've grown up hearing of workers buying homes on minimum wage and that the majority of families could support themselves on a single income. Yet despite huge advancements in automation, computing, and productivity I do not live in such a world.

I've seen the ways in which private business treats people who have no other choice: with no regard for their wellbeing, their humanity, or the law.

Private business serves as a useful means of parallelising and (somewhat) decentralising decision making, but unless brutally controlled it ravages society.

Much as this is the yc website, most of the commenters here are probably employees from deep blue states

Good point.