In my country, many of the state-controlled public services (e.g., electricity, water and sewage) are very expensive due to mismanagement. Others, like public healthcare are mediocre (don't scale well), albeit costly. Many of these entities suffer from being exposed to political influence.
This being the crux of the problem. Obtaining the benefit of state owned/controlled operations for such things without allowing them to be ruined by constant political interference in sync with the routine electoral cycles. A public health system or sewage or electricity is a multi decade resource of benefit to several generations of citizens… but politicians tend to think about the next election not their old age and future generations needs. It really requires and active and engaged citizenry to make proper operation a priority over the normal sort of political pandering.
Depends on the state, sort of like the quality of private companies vary and if you’ve ever lived in a part of you’re own country where the grocery stores are crap and later you move and their very competitive and a comparative delight. However, one has to experience the difference themselves to understand this fact I believe. There are a huge multitude of factors at play.
Many of us (me included for most of my life, hell maybe I’m doing it now), tend to over extrapolate how much our own experience is the experience everywhere and that what we see must be fitting some logical rule or trend. Reality is annoyingly more complex than we like.
