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Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

economist.com

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Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#341

Post by ehnto »

I always use train infrastructure as examples of infra that should remain public, as it's so essential for modern day cities. Privatisation seems to inevitably lead to service degradation and reduced utility, even corruption.

But my favourite example of trains done right is Japan, and to my surprise, their expansive rail network is dozens of private companies. It turned a lot of my assumptions upside down.

I still don't think we should privatise core rail infra, but obviously it can be done right. So we can at least try to do that.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#342

Post by panick21_ »

sarchertech wrote: post #333
panick21_ wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amtrak is the least subsidies mode of Transportation. It has to compete with road transport and the subsidies given to highways, roads and parking is orders of magnitude larger then what Amtrak gets. Amtrak gets surprisingly small amount of money.

Freight rail also has priority over Amtrak, which causes all kinds of problems with scheduling and adds insane delays.

I mean sure, we can talk for hours about issues with Amtrak.

However that doesn't change what I said so I'm not sure why you are bringing it up. Amtrak most likely wouldn't be profitable if they had priority.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#343

Post by ModernMech »

mrfumier wrote: post #62
juujian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even simpler than that. All of these privatized entities are incredibly efficient... at extracting profits from the public. Of course their goal is to extract profits. And you don't extract profits from a rail line by offering the best service. Bonus points if you can convince the government to bail you out and provide some extra cash.

"And you don't extract profits from a rail line by offering the best service." So how do you extract profits then?

By making sure there’s no water fountains on the train platforms, yet plenty of kiosks and vending machines that sell water.

I was just at EWR last night waiting for an arrival and there was an old man looking for water. He asks an employee where to find some and she looks at him like he has two heads.

“You have to buy some. Or you can drink out of the faucet in the restroom”

Can you imagine that? Telling an old man at 1am he has to drink out of a bathroom fixture to quench his thirst.

In my mind, I was hoping he was flying to a more civilized country. Because that’s the system we’ve built for ourselves. In a better present, the man would have access to a drink for free. But because a profit needs to be made, the entire airport is organized around little nickel and dime scams.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#344

Post by spacebanana7 »

gnfargbl wrote: post #117
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…

> I believe the best way to make this work is by keeping the network itself in public hands and then having a competition of contributors to the network - e.g. electricity providers that add energy to the grid. One area -- in fact, the only area that I can think of -- where privatisation has mostly worked in the UK is the telecommunications market. Here the networks are in private hands, but the providers are forced…

> One area -- in fact, the only area that I can think of -- where privatisation has mostly worked in the UK is the telecommunications market

Airline privatisation has also been quite successful compared to the rest.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#345

Post by nemo44x »

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…

The rub is when it becomes run and managed by the state it becomes political. And it has a tendency to grow unbound as bureaucracies tend to. And then they organize and become a political force and they negotiate their next contract with the person they helped elect.

I agree that it’s in the people’s interest to own the infrastructure. But the management of the service on that infrastructure should be auctioned into the private sector with oversight from the government.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#346

Post by madaxe_again »

ccppurcell wrote: post #93
madaxe_again wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation. Regulation regulation regulation. I too believe that free markets are the solution to a great many of the conundrums of organising a society, but I also believe that a strong and socially conscious (by which I mean its prime directive is the enhancement and improvement of living conditions for all of those under its jurisdiction) regulatory hand is necessary. The U.K. has plenty of regulations, and toothl…

Money is power. Regulation is a fig leaf. Think of taxation: the government makes all the rules on how much tax a business should pay under this or that circumstance. How much tax do the biggest companies pay? Next to nothing, pound for pound. Because they are able to use their money to exert power. Companies will always do this, so regulations will always erode over time.

This is a function of the form and culture of government - our current system, of professional politicians, is ruinous.

I have numerous thoughts on what would be better, such as sortition, or devolution and administrative federalisation, but as long as we have party politics and elections on mass scales, we will have corruption baked into the system. What we have worked reasonably well before mass communication, but with each step of communications technology, one of the core principles of representative democracy - representation - erodes, as the battles become tribal and personality driven on vast scales, and defy ration and reason.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#347

Post by 111111IIIIIII »

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…

Karl Marx showed us 150 years ago why your vision is impossible, and that is why we aren't taught about him in grade school despite him being the most famous intellectual in the world.

Under capitalism, private capital predominates; it decides the laws and the commons. If you think you've found a way around this, it's only a matter of time. We call it capitalism for a reason.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#348

Post by katbyte »

rolisz wrote: post #63
sschueller wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business always strives to optimize but while I stand here waiting for the bus I have to witness 5 different package carries battle it out on the tiny road where I live. Can't get more inefficient than that. What's next? Privatization of trash? I have actually seen this with recyclable trash, several companies with different colored trash bags that pick up on different days littering the street. I'm glad some towns h…

Privatization of trash collection has already happened in large parts of Romania. Sometimes the results are good, sometimes bad, but it's always much more expensive.

Privatization nearly almost always is more expensive because there is the inherent profit/return on investment that doesn’t exist in public infrastructure

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#349

Post by spacebanana7 »

avidphantasm wrote: post #119
mrcartmeneses wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two tests that privatisation has to pass. 1. Would it result in a monopoly, if so that’s a fail. 2. Does privatisation add value to the consumer? The evidence on that one so far is absolutely not. In general public services exist as public entities because they would otherwise necessarily be monopolies, and the only lever the public can therefore have is some kind of democratic process. In the case of UK pr…

> Does privatisation add value to the consumer? The evidence on that one so far is absolutely not. I’m sorry but it is a fiction that capitalist seizure of public goods are primarily intended to add value to “consumers”. If this does happen, it is an side effect, and I would argue a temporary one experienced while the system is coasting from the inertia of past public investments. You see the same thing with the vict…

> In the end without an ideological project that transcends personal or familial accumulation of capital, all collective enterprises are doomed to failure.

The public sector is unfortunately a terrible place to pursue ideological projects. Especially in a democracy where the ministers with leadership authority of a department change every 2-3 years and very wide groups of stakeholders need to endorse any substantial change.

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