Gregory's Server"Should we privatize this thing?"
And
"Should we give control over this thing to an unelected rich person who has no reason to act in the public good?"
Are exactly the same question
 35 comments
 @WhyNotZoidberg @researchfairy Efficiency is a ratio. It is a fraction, with a numerator and a denominator. To measure efficiency, you must measure and also specify the units for both of those. What divided by what? What per what? Without quantifying or at least naming the units, "efficiency" is just jerking off. @bamfic @researchfairy 95% it means "cheaper" (aka costs less tax Euros)  aka “pays workers less, in total” aka “moves less money into the active (“bottom”) end of the economy”? @timcoffman @researchfairy Also maybe "profitable" should be a secondary goal, if any. @WhyNotZoidberg @researchfairy "But corporate owned things are more efficient!" Yes, isn’t that what these people want and are already openly doing? If you’re trying to suggest they’re inconsistent here, I disagree (much as I would prefer my government unprivatised). Politicians do often have corporate sponsors, directly or indirectly, because the system makes being (or becoming) a successful politician expensive. @WhyNotZoidberg @researchfairy I'd really like to have some meme to illustrate that common people don't need more efficiency as it usually means "keep people waiting so there are no employees downtimes"  @WhyNotZoidberg @researchfairy efficient is an anti goal in infrastructure and directly opposed to resilience/redundancy. It needs to be effective, not efficient.  @researchfairy But someone wrote something famous called Tragedy of the Commons based on literally nothing but vibes and that implied that the government shouldn't be in charge of stuff! Old random British guy vibes rules clearly state...  @Oggie @researchfairy I always read the Hardin piece as just arguing that regulation *of some sort* is needed to avoid extinguishing resources through competitive consumption. The climate crisis is a good worked example of the basic problem. The more insidious quasi-libertarian case for slapping property rights on everything in lieu of regulation was pitched by a different author: Demsetz, Toward a Theory of Property Rights, 57 Am. Econ. Rev. 347-359 (1967). That's the neocon tap root. Yeah, as someone who sits somewhere between market socialism and a mixed model, I’m a big believer in the tragedy of the commons—that’s precisely why eg the rail network *shouldn’t* be run on the revenue from its own tickets, and why if it operates in a market of any kind that market should very specifically not be “free” (in the sense of “free to extract financial value from the service to give to its owners, to the detriment of its users/customers”). Imagine if everyone had to have an Elsevier sub for every piece of literature in existence.  @researchfairy @currentbias @researchfairy @currentbias I *do* want people fed and housed “efficiently” in the sense that long-term I want the most people fed and housed comfortably, which means achieving that comfort by the expenditure of the least resources per person. For example, making/keeping people poor is inefficient as it makes them spend more (it’s expensive to be poor, as per Vimes). So an “efficient” system needs to be against poverty. I agree that perfect is the enemy of good, but efficient *is* better with the right definition of value. @researchfairy "ok you see the free market produces better solutions because of competition, so that's why we're giving an exclusive contract for providing this public service to a single company" @waitworry @researchfairy @econads @waitworry @researchfairy Rail’s an interesting case. Allowing multiple, potentially private operators, to directly compete, can have benefits, but rail infrastructure needs to be something like a public good to allow such a market. Railway privatisation results in a natural monopoly, which worsens outcomes. In effect, a market requires public ownership, which is not what economic orthodoxy would indicate. @janef0421 @waitworry @researchfairy  @waitworry @researchfairy "The free market is much more efficient than government could ever be. We have to get rid of any publicly-owned option so that the free market can be viable."  @researchfairy This is always preceded by years of undermining public services to make them ineffective and easy plunder  @researchfairy Something we often do in land use regulation is assume bad faith, the worst actor. What is the worst case? For privatization this strikes me as a fantastic approach given the track record. Except it’s (mostly) not even bad faith. Corporate officers are well-known to be (legally required to be!) acting in the interests of the company. They can’t even claim to be moving value from their company to the public good, or they would be in breach of responsibilities to shareholders. Granted you may get some “eccentric billionaires” who *could* go either way but since there are more players required to act sociopathically, it’s not even a question we need rules to direct them to do good.  Ah, yes. This and also throwing public services under the bus by not funding them nearly enough is usually the case.  @researchfairy you can privatise ownership but regulate how the service is operated, set rules for pricing etc. not saying this is necessarily a good idea, but it is a thing that is done in practice. requires a government that is willing and able to, of course.  @bjoernstaerk @researchfairy from experience as soneone living in a country with plenty of that (public private partnerships, supposedly regulated essential services, privately managed public services, etc): it's just a strategy so the richbois can extract more tax money and blame "regulations" every time something goes wrong (which always happens eventually). @ncrav @researchfairy also speaking from experience, there are many countries, many ways to attempt this. trains run like this in Norway, for instance. is it a success? no. better than how Britain did it, but i wouldn't recommend. but the problem with it is not that a rich person is now in charge of trains, or even that they're extracting tax money and blaming regulations. mostly just that it's not a good way to run trains. @bjoernstaerk @researchfairy in Portugal our passenger train company which is now a EPE (public but under the same law as private) and has only degraded service further. This started before the private management with profit seeking politicians. For instance most lines and stations in the interior are there, but have been closed or underserved starting since the early 1990s. Nowadays even main lines are underserved and we don't even have a high speed connection to the rest of Europe. |
@researchfairy "But corporate owned things are more efficient!" - Efficient in what manner, and for whom?