Utilities, in particular, can and often should be owned by municipalities or states. For every example of an inefficiently-run state-owned enterprise, there’s a dozen boring, local, publicly-owned utilities that are run as well or better than private companies.

The clusterfucks tend to be at the national level where there’s no real oversight. A corrupt president might be able to treat a utility as a slush fund or jobs program and get away with it but a mayor or county executive just doesn’t have the juice to be flagrantly corrupt without someone investigating.