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Top-level
There is a prevailing belief in Poland that private is good, public is bad. This has nothing to do with the reality and it stems from post communist attitudes. If you want to see the true difference between private and public operations look at English vs Scottish Water companies. Or German public trains vs English private trains. Private companies have only one goal - to sell cheap products & services for as much money as possible. 25 comments
According to the Wikipedia Deutsche Bahn is 100% state owned enterprise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bahn?wprov=sfti1# It is therefore considered a public entity operating within the private sector. Banks lending money to DB consider state taxes as security against the loan. The difference between a SEO and a Statutory Corporation such as Scottish Water is that SEO can invest in private companies such as four British train lines. 1/2 This means that each time you buy a train ticket in England, you’re defacto paying for Germany to implement Deutschland-Ticket, which gives the ticket holder unlimited Germany-wide travel for €49 per month. If you need to commute for work from Manchester to London on Monday, expect to pay £114 one way. Publicly owned DB: €49 per month unlimited travel Private English company (owned by DB): £114 single ticket. 🤯 @RaffKarva I went down the rabbit hole of reading DB latest report. Very interesting read: What stood out to me was this: “More than 1.8 billion passengers took our trains in 2023, a year-on-year increase of more than 5%. By taking the train instead of driving, they traveled the climate-friendly way: our long-distance passengers reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 7.5 million tons.” @RaffKarva Yes, there are plenty of reasons to use rail over driving here, the Deutschlandticket being among them. The numbers look similar for the other public transport companies/agencies (there's another rabbit). Of course, there's plenty to complain about as well - you're likely to hear too much of it if you ever ask a German person about those. Thatcher’s government privatised water in England 35 years ago. Scottish water remained fully public during this time. I don’t think there has been a better case study to compare private vs public ownership. I truly recommend that you study English private train companies (the whole of England got privatised by Thatcher) It’s not one monopoly. It’s around 30 private companies. Then compare those companies to one state owned Deutsche Bahn. DB is by far the best train travel I experienced throughout the whole of Europe. €49 per month for unlimited country wide travel in Germany. £114 for a single ticket from Manchester to London. There’s this myth sold by capitalists that within the private market competition leads to lower prices and better services. This is unfortunately nothing but a myth. What happens in reality is this: @albertcardona @miki @RaffKarva Wow! Sitting in a „fast“ train across Germany right now, I do not quite know how to digest this praise for DB! Rarely heard. 😉 Truth to be told: The 49€ do not allow to use these fast trains… Still, you can get (criss-)cross-country with it. @kraweel65 @albertcardona @miki In Germany, you can easily live in Hannover and commute for work to Bremen or Hamburg for €49 per month. In England same distance work commute from Peterborough to London is £788 per month only available on two (out of 25) train lines. Also, I used trains in Germany hundreds of times, not once was it cancelled. In England 1 in 10 commutes are cancelled each month. Privatisation is a scam. @kraweel65 @albertcardona @miki @RaffKarva People who complain about the state of DB have clearly never spent much time relying on the British train system. @kraweel65 @albertcardona @miki @RaffKarva Last time I was in Germany, the ICE I was on was taken out of service due to a fault. The whole experience showed me what the correct way to deal with such a situation. We were delayed by 30 minutes. Trains going out of service happens very frequently on UK trains, and I'm often abandoned with no help or advice, delayed 3 or more hours, forced onto overcrowded alternative trains  @IanSudbery @kraweel65 @albertcardona @miki @RaffKarva Incidentally, I tell my compatriots who complain about the state of ÖBB that they clearly haven't spent much time relying on long-distance rail in Germany. 😁  @IanSudbery @kraweel65 @miki @RaffKarva It’s a bit of an unfair comparison, because the British rail system is perhaps at the bottom (and distant from the second-bottom) of Western European rail. @albertcardona @IanSudbery @kraweel65 @miki But that’s the whole point. Comparison. German train service is public. Former is great and cheap.  @RaffKarva @miki @albertcardona Ahhh... Myopic Maggie. The truth is, privatised 'public services', e.g. roads, rail, power, sewage ... are ALL cartels. That's it. There's nothing clever about it and every single one of them is ONLY interested in maximising profit. What on earth is the point??? “Myopic Maggie” - I never heard that before. Good one. Yeap, it’s always been this way with private companies: @RaffKarva @miki @albertcardona Ha! Yes, I came up with 'Myopic Maggie' a few years ago, after ongoing discussions with a very old friend, who thought that Maggie was a true great. Sigh. It was her complete lack of vision. Her failure to understand humanity and the inevitability of her policies that led me the nickname. I was often heard in the late 80s saying ... 'just wait to see what this will lead to in 30yrs' ... and ... well, here we are today. Totally predictable. Poland is roughly a decade behind England in privatisation. Moreover, Poland did not adopt the full scale privatisation as introduced by Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism. A lot of my polish friends have this naive view of capitalism. They don’t see that given enough time privatisation always ends up with monopolies and/or cartels. Each time the public ends up paying more for worse product or service. @RaffKarva @miki @albertcardona When faced with this, I tend to ask a rhetorical question : "If you let people do what they want.. what will they do? This aspect of humanity, is where free markets and unrestrained capitalism fall apart. You can't let them do what they want, because some people are the shittiest narcissists you can imagine and they will do anything to get cash and as we all know... money=power=money=power... I often say: Circa 10% of humanity is naturally greedy. Circa 10% of humanity is naturally altruistic. The rest can be swung either way. Capitalism is set up by the greedy. |
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@RaffKarva
While I agree with the sentiment, it's important to note that DB is *not* a public entity but a publicly traded company with a controlling stake held by the state. The difference is that it, too, operates on a for profit model (and is failing miserably, given that they started debt free and now owe staggering sums to various banks).
@miki @albertcardona