Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

Post by GrumpyNl » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 11:14 AM UTC

wolframhempel wrote: post #9

I am a deep believer in free markets as the most efficient mechanism for distributing goods and services, creating better offerings and lower prices through competition and encapsulating risk in innovation. Unfortunately, none of these apply to the privatization of inherently public commodities that run on top of an underlying network infrastructure. This can be streets, railway tracks or water pipes - whenever there…

Post by itsthejb » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 11:16 AM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #35

narven wrote: post #16

There's been only a couple of "privatisations" in entire world, that actually resulted in some benefits. Privatisation means, "you that don't give a fc... take care of that problem for me"

From my user's perspective, it seems that privatization of Germany's phone and Internet market has worked pretty well, and lowered prices all around. Though I don't know if that was because there was a huge boom of Internet access around that time, and telephony prices would have dropped anyway, or if that was one of the examples where it did work, inherently.

Post by tnel77 » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 11:16 AM UTC

neximo64 wrote: post #43

tnel77 wrote: post #3

When profit becomes the main motivator, quality of services always seem to drop. I get that the government can be annoying, but I feel like there are many services that we should aim to provide as a society where profit isn’t the goal. For example, you don’t need to price gouge people for electricity, but charging enough to cover expenses and future infrastructure upgrades is fine and to be expected. No costly CEO or…

The other side of that coin is, with quality as the main motivator, the prices go up. There's no free ride either way through organising things differently, its a choice between quality or price (as opposed to getting quality at a cheaper price). The other issue of course is in a public setting, there is no motive for efficiency.

Post by tnel77 » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 11:17 AM UTC

waihtis wrote: post #146

tnel77 wrote: post #3

When profit becomes the main motivator, quality of services always seem to drop. I get that the government can be annoying, but I feel like there are many services that we should aim to provide as a society where profit isn’t the goal. For example, you don’t need to price gouge people for electricity, but charging enough to cover expenses and future infrastructure upgrades is fine and to be expected. No costly CEO or…

So why not a private non-profit instead of government?

Post by cycomanic » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 11:18 AM UTC

dffdsa432 wrote: post #216

bluescrn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Privatise the profits, Nationalise the losses!"

What about losses from federally funded corporations like USPS and Amtrak that are bailed out every year? Amtrak loses over $1 billion/yr and they are still "nationalized." USPS loses multi billions per year.