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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

#591

Post by oblio »

gary_0 wrote: post #554
spacebanana7 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's so subjective. If a democratic government decided that policing, clean air or firefighting weren't public goods they'd be incorrect. Even if polling supported it.

Anarcho-capitalists would argue strongly that all 3 of your examples are no different from any other service provided to customers. I've seen them (or sympathetic sci-fi writers) think up all sorts of imaginative scenarios about how that might work. Personally I agree with you, I think privatizing any of those things would be madness, because the real world never ends up working like the ideological fantasy, but it's…

> Anarcho-capitalists would argue strongly that all 3 of your examples are no different from any other service provided to customers. I've seen them (or sympathetic sci-fi writers) think up all sorts of imaginative scenarios about how that might work.

That's just silly, we've had the anarcho-capitalists perspective in the past, that's how the modern firefighting services were started.

Do you know how they'd work?

Firefighters would come up to your house and ask for half of what was inside in order to extinguish the fire, because there's no free market for desperate people.

Ooooor... they'd do the same to your neighbors, because if they wouldn't extinguish your fire, their house could burn down, too.

Ooooor... they'd set stuff on fire so that they'd have who to blackmail.

Ooooor... you could pay them a constant insurance/protection fee so that they'd actually help. And that insurance/protection fee would become widespread, because who wants their house to burn down?

At which point, why not just distribute the cost to everyone since 99.999% of buildings can burn down, and make it a public service?

Which is where we are now.

Anarcho-capitalists and libertarians are basically people who don't know history and would want to speedrun it with great pain and suffering for everyone, along the way.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#592

Post by darkclouds »

smcl wrote: post #565
darkclouds wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a consequence of this there are some rivers, lakes and beaches in England + Wales that are now unsafe but which weren't before they were privatised. Carefully chosen words, someone has done their research! Thats what happens when new standards come into force and improve upon the old standards. https://environment.data.gov.uk/portalstg/home/item.html?id=... "The purpose of this dataset is to present a summary of…

You're going to have to do a bit more than hand-waving about a bathing water directive being repealed back in 2014 and dumping a couple of links. If you want to make a point, make it.

There's lots of factors at play here, it could be brexit related because the beachs have become soiled so people go to Europe for a break, we dont know who is invested in Thames water, are these british pension funds or other types of investors. Is this a sexism thing, what with a female ceo, has she been wrongly advised, manipulated with data presented in a particular way.

There's so many factors potentially at play here and some of it we wont get to ever know about, but life has taught me there is manipulation in many guises.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#593

Post by dTal »

juujian wrote: post #25
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…

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.

This is one of those times where the math is so simple that it's baffling that anyone misses it. When a private company must 1) do the same job as a public service while also 2) coming up with surplus bags of cash to hand over to investors and shareholders, how can it possibly be more efficient?

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#594

Post by majani »

efields wrote: post #428

Just browsing the comments on this one, it struck me how users of this website, an incubator for new technologies and ostensibly private businesses, seems to not believe in the capacity of private businesses to provide the most socially-useful goods and services. My basic woke laymen POV is that the in last 150+/- years, we figured out 100% of how to sustain humanity at scale and even offer some perks like efficientl…

Much as this is the yc website, most of the commenters here are probably employees from deep blue states

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#595

Post by efields »

majani wrote: post #594
efields wrote: post #428

Just browsing the comments on this one, it struck me how users of this website, an incubator for new technologies and ostensibly private businesses, seems to not believe in the capacity of private businesses to provide the most socially-useful goods and services. My basic woke laymen POV is that the in last 150+/- years, we figured out 100% of how to sustain humanity at scale and even offer some perks like efficientl…

Much as this is the yc website, most of the commenters here are probably employees from deep blue states

Good point.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#596

Post by smcl »

darkclouds wrote: post #592
smcl wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to have to do a bit more than hand-waving about a bathing water directive being repealed back in 2014 and dumping a couple of links. If you want to make a point, make it.

There's lots of factors at play here, it could be brexit related because the beachs have become soiled so people go to Europe for a break, we dont know who is invested in Thames water, are these british pension funds or other types of investors. Is this a sexism thing, what with a female ceo, has she been wrongly advised, manipulated with data presented in a particular way. There's so many factors potentially at play…

Wait before you were certain I was some sneaky trickster doing wordplay and that you had a slam dunk of a response, now “there’s lots of factors at play here”?

What changed?

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#597

Post by darkclouds »

smcl wrote: post #596
darkclouds wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of factors at play here, it could be brexit related because the beachs have become soiled so people go to Europe for a break, we dont know who is invested in Thames water, are these british pension funds or other types of investors. Is this a sexism thing, what with a female ceo, has she been wrongly advised, manipulated with data presented in a particular way. There's so many factors potentially at play…

Wait before you were certain I was some sneaky trickster doing wordplay and that you had a slam dunk of a response, now “there’s lots of factors at play here”? What changed?

Nothing has changed, I simply didnt document all my thoughts on here straight away because its not a Rorschach test, besides I let google suggest some of the links, because I've noted how manipulative it is at shaping public discourse.

An upgrade to Eli Parsier's original filter bubble warning, one might say. https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#598

Post by Karunamon »

triceratops wrote: post #515
Karunamon wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite literally yes when we are talking about letters. Even if they did it for cheaper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes

Ah yes letters, the backbone of revenue for any delivery service.

Irrelevant snipe. I am not the one who said "a similar service". In a world where USPS had to compete, other entities could deliver letters.

Re: Privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain

#599

Post by iso1631 »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #499
iso1631 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other way round. Railtrack was a private company on the FTSE. It killed people. Network Rail then took the rail infrastructure back in house.

Railtrack was created as a publicly owned company in 1994 and operated as such until it was privatised in 1996. It was forced into administration in 2001 (after Hatfield) and in 2002 Network Rail was created to buy its assets.

That's how everything was privatised
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