Im honestly trying to think of one thing in my 47 years on the planet which has been privatized and gotten better, cheaper, and/or more efficient.
Does anyone have examples?
1. From the US, or from the world? The world is easy. It's also easy to find catastrophic privatizations. On average, privatization has been good globally, I would say. There's a reason why the Washington Consensus formed and is still utilized in developmental economics. People have for some time recognized that the Washington Consensus needs much more attention to context, but the core idea of privatization as promoting efficiency is generally sound.
Of course, in the countries where privatization has worked, it's also true that the government hadn't "organically" grown into its present state. Countries like Mexico and Argentina first nationalized industries by fiat, essentially buying them for well below actual value (when one considers the reparations that are usually paid if the industry was corporate). And the nationalization was generally carried out by corrupt governments, and the nationalization was part of the scheme of corruption. So privatization was a scale-back of ill-gotten power.
2. By contrast, the growth of government in the US has been organic. It's been a century-long process (really longer than a century now) of democratic governments responding to the needs of the citizenry. The New Deal happened during the Depression because it was needed. Medicare/Medicaid happened in the 60s because it was needed. Same with Obamacare. And until fairly recently, administrations from both parties tried to manage the new government powers responsibly, even if they didn't necessarily agree with the original policy. I don't want to exaggerate the bipartisanship, or pretend that the GOP has never before appointed people to head agencies that they want not to exist. But we've never had an actual pro-pollution EPA administrator before Trump.
Point is: government tends to be more efficient in the US because it was designed to be good; people have generally wanted it to work well; and congressional oversight and the IG system -- part of the rule of law, which is often absent in the nationalizing countries -- tries to root out waste or corruption. Also, qui tam laws are not well known but surprisingly effective.
3. And the follow-up point: we don't have many examples of privatization per se, because we never had much to privatize. The best example that comes to mind was the Airline Deregulation Act of Carter's presidency. The airlines weren't nationalized before that, but regulation was very heavy-handed. Lifting that regulation turned out to be a great thing overall.
Lots of health policy people think that Medicare Advantage is a good program, and it's privately administered. I have no real knowledge of it, and have not followed those policy debates at all, so I have nothing to say about it beyond mentioning it.
The growth of Fed Ex and UPS is an example of a successful partial privatization. It was never a law or a discrete policy decision, but the parcel delivery system has fragmented: private carriers dominate in high-value carriage (e.g. overnight), whereas the post office still does most ordinary mail. Until the DeJoy debacle, the service quality from the post office has increased since Fed Ex created more competition. Undoubtedly, Fed Ex does what it does -- i.e. very fast transport -- better than the postal service. It's of course not a fair comparison, since the USPS has a more expansive mandate than Fed Ex, and we don't know how well Fed Ex would support rural areas because it's never really tried.