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> You obviously have not been around non-profit, government run entities. The waste they create, the inefficiency inherent in such enterprises is terrifying.
by trog 3y ago
> You obviously have not been around non-profit, government run entities. The waste they create, the inefficiency inherent in such enterprises is terrifying.
I have been wondering recently about the value of a market-based approach has to exceed the waste and inefficiency of government entities, and whether it's always better to have government do things in those cases.
I don't have a lot of data on this yet other than really high level things (e.g., the cost of healthcare in the US being very high compared to other approaches), but it seems likely to me that having a single entity coordinating things is going to be more efficient under most circumstances - even accounting for the waste - once you remove the market challenges.
e.g. I think about this a lot in our local energy market while prices are sky-rocketing and I'm seeing useless ads everywhere. Simply removing the cost of advertising/marketing/CaC would drop prices significantly in many markets. It's regulated out the ass anyway so there is basically no real competition outside of pricing shenanigans and complexity to confuse consumers, so there is very little advantage to it pretending to be a 'market'.
It's just a huge play to enrich shareholders at the expense of citizens and offers very little benefit. A single entity, even if it was very (almost spectacularly) wasteful seems like it would probably be less expensive.
- chii 3y ago> whether it's always better to have government do things in those cases. if there's gonna be waste, i don't want my tax dollars to be wasted. I don't care if private dollars are wasted, since it's not me taking the hit.
- trog 3y ago> if there's gonna be waste, i don't want my tax dollars to be wasted. I don't care if private dollars are wasted, since it's not me taking the hit. Well, it depends on what it is - if it's a service that you consume, even indirectly, you /are/ taking the hit, because the price you pay will reflect the costs of the company providing the service. Using the example of energy again - if you're in a place where the energy production is fully privatised, any waste that happens there might impact shareholders more, but you can absolutely bet some of it will be felt by customers.
- ivan_gammel 3y agoI have bad news for you: in a for-profit property market with increasing margins your money are effectively wasted, because the higher the prices, the more employees in the public sector pay. To fill the vacancies government has to pay more and more, effectively redistributing your money to landlords and construction industry. Inefficiency of this spending is much higher than that of any state-owned enterprise.
- chii 3y ago> because the higher the prices, the more employees in the public sector pay i dont' quite get the rationale for this claim - are you saying that higher property prices somehow increases public sector pay? And why is public sector job vacancy have anything to do with the price of real estate?
- ivan_gammel 3y agoAccording to the recent data of Berlin government, high property prices and scarcity of affordable apartments are one of the reasons for labor shortage in public sector here. In order to fill the vacancies they need to significantly increase the salaries increasing burden for taxpayers. IMO causal link here is pretty obvious: if a teacher cannot afford living in the city, they won’t work in that city as teachers and either find a different job or leave. The same thing is happening everywhere in the world, where teacher or social salaries aren’t high enough.