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>"The firm [Royal Mail], bought by a Czech billionaire in December..." I've no words. We're just playthings in a billionaire world.
That's the UK in a nutshell this past decade. Privatise all of the public services for a quick buck, and slowly but surely the service decays whilst the prices for consumers increases. The trains in the UK are a great example of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the UK in a nutshell this past decade. Privatise all of the public services for a quick buck, and slowly but surely the service decays whilst the prices for consumers increases. The trains in the UK are a great example of this.
There's no iron law stating that private services must necessarily decay or be under provisioned.
This seems like a good idea, but I hope it doesn't stop the recent tradition of yarn-bombing[0] the postboxes[1][2]. The ones near me are really creative, change with seasons & national holidays, and just add a bit of British whimsy to day-to-day life. (Looks like there's already some articles on this angle [3]!) [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarn_bombing [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_box_topper [2]…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the UK in a nutshell this past decade. Privatise all of the public services for a quick buck, and slowly but surely the service decays whilst the prices for consumers increases. The trains in the UK are a great example of this.
There's no iron law stating that private services must necessarily decay or be under provisioned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the UK in a nutshell this past decade. Privatise all of the public services for a quick buck, and slowly but surely the service decays whilst the prices for consumers increases. The trains in the UK are a great example of this.
There's no iron law stating that private services must necessarily decay or be under provisioned.
;)
>"The firm [Royal Mail], bought by a Czech billionaire in December..." I've no words. We're just playthings in a billionaire world.
That's the UK in a nutshell this past decade. Privatise all of the public services for a quick buck, and slowly but surely the service decays whilst the prices for consumers increases. The trains in the UK are a great example of this.
Publicly run services and utilities often suffer from inefficiencies because there's no incentive to change the processes and lots of government funded agencies suffer from the "we must spend our entire budget or we'll get less next year" syndrome.
Privatisation replaces the leadership with people who are incentivised to make the organisation as efficient as possible, but the actual quality of the services delivered matters if people are stuck with a now privatised monopoly and they have no choice of provider (or e.g. energy companies where the choice doesn't really make a meaningful difference anyway).
Probably the sensible middle ground is for the government to maintain a sizeable but minority share in everything that gets privatised, with a general policy of never exercising the voting rights unless it's against a course of action that is clearly detrimental to public interest. Probably even the threat of being able to vote out key personnel would be enough to keep them focussed on serving the public better. And with something like a 40% share, the shareholders have enough incentive to keep profitability high, and the government would also share in the profits of the previously public entity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the UK in a nutshell this past decade. Privatise all of the public services for a quick buck, and slowly but surely the service decays whilst the prices for consumers increases. The trains in the UK are a great example of this.
It does seem to be the inevitable consequence, but often privatisation is required too. Publicly run services and utilities often suffer from inefficiencies because there's no incentive to change the processes and lots of government funded agencies suffer from the "we must spend our entire budget or we'll get less next year" syndrome. Privatisation replaces the leadership with people who are incentivised to make the…
This is the core lie that economists have sold us. Private companies are not incentivised to be efficient, but to make as big a profit as possible. This usually means they cut quality, reduce unprofitable activity and extract every last cent they can out of their customers or other source of funding.
Public benefit companies run on a service-first principle. They deliver the required service to everyone, at the same quality, at a reasonable price - at all cost. They're sometimes inefficient at doing that, but more often than not, any "efficiency" gains would mean reducing service quality or accessibility, which is not acceptable when you work for the people, not the shareholders.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the UK in a nutshell this past decade. Privatise all of the public services for a quick buck, and slowly but surely the service decays whilst the prices for consumers increases. The trains in the UK are a great example of this.
There's no iron law stating that private services must necessarily decay or be under provisioned.