this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Social Democrat.
Lots of anti monopoly pro consumer regulations. But freedom to have private enterprise. High income and corporate tax. Free healthcare & education. Even rare diseases and university. Corporations can only lease and never own land. Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas.
I get the reasons for most of your points from a perspective of moderate "leftist". But why "Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas"?
You seem to somewhat believe in private enterprise, so why prevent it from providing those services at competitive cost/quality?
Markets work best when there are a number of firms that must compete with one another. For some goods and services, that level of competition is impractical or impossible because of the high amount of infrastructure required. It wouldn’t make much sense for each company to build a completely separate set of water purification and distribution systems—it would be very expensive and take up a lot of space.
In many areas of the US we have a bizarre setup where there is a government enforced monopoly where a single company can reap all of the profits. This often leads to poor service because the company has very little incentive to provide value to its customers. Government owned services can be flawed as well but at least they are directly accountable to their citizens instead of a board or shareholders.
As I said in reply to other person, in my country there's private businesses providing those services for cheaper price than the government alternative. Infrastructure for the most part is provided by 3rd party.
Also I keep hearing this talk about "government accountability", but what mechanism of accountability does government have? Private firms at least can go out of business or sued. Government in worst case will just pay you some of its "tax money"
What specific services are you referring to? If there are multiple firms and the government competing then that really doesn’t sound like the situation I was describing.
Governments can also be sued though they sometimes grant themselves immunity. But utilities really can’t go out of business, can they? Generally they are providing what are considered essential services, so if they fail, the government will generally bail them out because they are the only provider and the loss of those services would be catastrophic. So there really is very little accountability. Just ask PG&E customers how much say they have in that company’s practices.
As far as government accountability, that’s what elections are for. Do you not have those in your country?
My point is they don't lose hard earned money, they just pay you money they collect forcefully from people. Basically it's not a deterrent, but simple restitution
It's quite rare for any candidate to talk about utilities in their campaign at all.
People here tend to not associate govt owned corporations with the government itself. And when someone brings it up, they just make some kind of excuse about what terrible person you are for accusing such a benevolent government of incompetence when they don't fix their stuff, and increase price 2
And besides, chances of reelection are so slim I doubt any politician actually going for it. It's much more profitable to simply lie about your promises
They should declare bankruptcy and be sold to someone
Government failed to consistently provide power — no catastrophe. Government failed to provide any water at all — no catastrophe (some people just started to pump and sell underground water)
So why private buisness not providing just one of those services for the period before it's bought, must result in catastrophe? (Just for time reference, the absence of water I described earlier already lasts longer than a year)
That sounds like a pretty insane situation that would not be tolerated in most developed countries. Generally lapse of service for essential utilities is considered a major problem that would absolutely be relevant to local elections in my area. It sounds like your government is very poorly run and needs dramatic changes—such changes could be implemented through elections. In the meantime it’s good that private entities are filling the gap but I doubt they are able to provide the same level of service as most people expect from utilities.
My point is they don't lose hard earned money, they just pay you money they collect forcefully from people. Basically it's not a deterrent, but simple restitution
It's quite rare for any candidate to talk about utilities in their campaign at all.
People here tend to not associate govt owned corporations with the government itself. And when someone brings it up, they just make some kind of excuse about what terrible person you are for accusing such a benevolent government of incompetence when they don't fix their stuff, and increase price 2
And besides, chances of reelection are so slim I doubt any politician actually going for it. It's much more profitable to simply lie about your promises
They should declare bankruptcy and be sold to someone
Government failed to consistently provide power — no catastrophe. Government failed to provide any water at all — no catastrophe (some people just started to pump and sell underground water)
So why private buisness not providing just one of those services for the period before it's bought, must result in catastrophe? (Just for time reference, the absence of water I described earlier already lasts longer than a year)
I'm not the person you replied to and this isn't well thought out. Just trying to think this through myself.
How would something like an electric company offer competitive cost or quality? There'd have to be at least two options serving an area in order for there to be some kind of competition. So do each of those companies build their own infrastructure, power stations, power lines, etc? So a neighborhood would have two sets of power lines? That seems wasteful and would get pretty ugly as more competitors came in. So maybe instead the government builds the infrastructure and the competing companies lease the usage of the infrastructure. But then what are the companies going to offer as a competitive advantage? I don't know. They need to make some kind of profit in order to justify their existence. And they have to pay for the usage of the infrastructure. And they don't want to lose money. And let's assume the government doesn't pick favorites and charges each of them the same. So we end up paying them more than what it costs them to lease the infrastructure. So why can't we just cut them out, i.e. cut out the middle man, and pay the government directly. I guess this all just assumes that there's nothing extra an electric company can offer on top of the electricity being supplied.
What you’re describing kind of exists here in Portugal, the transmission lines are owned by the state but the actual electricity generation / internet service / whatever is left to private companies. So you can go onto a web portal and change your supplier to a different electric company or ISP or whatever, without needing to physically do anything at your house. Just maybe exchange a router or something like that. But no builders coming out to the property or whatever. And where I live near Lisbon there are like 8-10 available suppliers.
In my country private companies provide their service much cheaper than government alternative. And, yes they use shared infrastructure.
I can't dispute that. I hear people claim that in my country too. But I just wonder how they can know that for a fact. Like okay, maybe they've seen a service provided by a private entity for X amount and a comparable service provided by the government for Y amount more. But how can we know what's going on behind the scenes? Is the company being subsidized by the government? Is the government charging more for this service to offset and lower the price of some other service? Or is the government charging us more for the overhead of having thousands or millions of customers where on the other hand, it can charge a company to lease the infrastructure for less for the reduced overhead of only having that company as a "customer"? I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud. I just question where the motive comes into play for private companies. Their motive is to make money. Do they have us in their best interests? They can cut costs and have huge failures like what happened in Texas with their power grid. But then there can be huge government failure too providing these services like with what happened to the water system in Flint, MI. I'm not really educated on either of these so it's possible I'm totally misrepresenting these. And I'm not claiming that there isn't waste, abuse and corruption in government either. At the end of the day, public and private entities are run by people. But anyway, thanks for indulging my stream of consciousness.