"Privatizers always assert that private enterprises function more efficiently and will thus cost society less than public enterprises."
True, that's the claim. However, the writer argues against another proposition: "Privatizers assert that private enterprises always function more efficiently and will thus cost society less than public enterprises."
They're far from the same assertion.
Later, we read, "Officials always assured us that those public enterprises would get us out of crisis sooner and better than private enterprises could or would; in short, the public enterprise was the more efficient way to go."
However, in the '30s the goal wasn't efficiency defined as unit production/dollar. The goal was increased employment. The government had money to spend. It could increase the scope of a service when business couldn't and subsidize inefficiency when that would have been fatal to a private business.
"Yet they discovered, especially after 2007, that government takeovers are often bailouts of capitalists also at workers' and citizens' expenses."
It's not clear at whose expense most of the bailouts in 2008 and early 2009 were. Most of the monies used in the "bailout" were returned with interest. Somehow I fail to see how my loaning out money at interest and seeing the loan repaid is all that seriously "at my expense," and I find the administrator's bookkeeping on the matter to be deceitful: It misses opportunity costs and only counts income versus expenses in its calculations in a purely CYA-based effort to avoid criticism. But perhaps the writer isn't speaking in terms of dollars and cents, at least in that sentence. Perhaps it's a wider social issue. So let's look there.
The reason the recession was so devastating is found in the defense given Obama when his administration's predictions--those that could be tested--failed. It wasn't just a recession, it was a fiscal crisis as well. By 3/09 or so the fiscal crisis itself was over, actions taken from 10/08 to 3/09 settled things down enough for crisis management to be considered bipartisan and a reasonable success. What was left was a liquidity crunch and the fall-out from the fiscal crisis. Had the fiscal crisis continued, the crunch would have been far worse and the effects far longer lasting. We complain about how the economy in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 failed to recover quickly enough; how it devastated lower- and middle-class savings and wealth. Imagine how it would have not been at the public's expense if 2009 had continued until 2012 and the recovery started in 2013. Apparently the writer would say that would be to the public's benefit? (If so, the writer has a restricted view of "public," and decrees a large portion of Americans as "not part of the public" or perhaps "not really people."
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