I feel like it depends on your translation and how you define “free”.

I like to compare it to the differences between expenses and costs. Which is something people often confuse. Expenses are talking about the outflow of money and costs are talking about the effect of it on the bottom line.

“Free” education is free, because it’s not an expense it can be considered and indirect cost. It might never be something that is paid if you never pay taxes for whatever reason.

People also consider their social security income free because they don’t need to do more for it than filling in a form often online

It depends a bit on the country and type of business.

But yeah private companies can be cheaper and more efficient because the people in charge actually benefit from it. There is often less shit to deal with in the form of bureaucracy.

On the other hand (and this is generally where angelosaxton business culture takes over), this does push for more and more profit since people always want more every year. Everybody likes their yearly wage increase.

In the case of prisons in the US there is a twofold issue, on one hand it’s privatised, but in the other hand there aren’t laws preventing people from doing this bullshit.

Amazon has always been worse for me in terms of delovery times and service anyway. I only order shit there that I otherwise need to get from Aliexpress or whatever

The weird this is that generally the once with shit quality make a decent profit and a lot of the once with way better food make almost nothing.