this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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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?
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.
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.