7 ms·

Why is this a problem if other sectors, of great importance to society, can be privately own too? Something like >99% of all food consumed daily in the US is pr

• RyanHamilton 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordie_Howe_International_Bridge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordie_Howe_International_Br... The owner tied to stop another bridge being built. "First proposed in the early 2000s, the project was met with prominent opposition by Ambassador Bridge owner Manuel "Matty" Moroun, who believed competition from a publicly owned bridge would reduce his revenue.". Private owner wants to maximize their income even if it means worse service for the public.
  • tokai 3y ago
    But thats the problem with anykind of private ownership. Why is it an issue here if not in healthcare or other sectors?
    • hiatus 3y ago
      Who is saying it's not an issue in other sectors?
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      It is an issue in other sectors. Private healthcare, infrastructure ownership, education and so on all have negative societal effects. They also increase the gap between poor and rich and there are feedback effects involved that work across generations.
    • hackerlight 3y ago
      It's an issue everywhere. Private property creates an incentive for people to weaponize democracy for their own zero-sum/negative-sum gain. For example, farming subsidies. That doesn't mean private property should be illegal. You need some private property for prosperity. It means the democratic system needs to be very carefully designed to minimize this corrupting influence.
    • KittenInABox 3y ago
      It is a problem in other sectors. I don't know about your education level US history, but in highschool (ages 13-17) people are generally taught that private ownership of crucial infrastructure such as oil and railroads ended up having such negative effects that it was actually good the government stepped in and broke them up. It is also why the government mandated several regulations in things like food safety and telephone services.
• Hello71 3y ago
  is >99% of all food consumed daily privately owned and sold by a single company?
  • brvsft 3y ago
    > 25% of US/Canada trade depends on a single privately owned bridge Where are you taking this analogy?
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      For the region it is 99% of the traffic, nobody will drive for half a day to avoid the bridge. But when the alternative opens (and it is not a toll bridge) you can expect traffic on the privately owned bridge to drop like a stone and likely it will eventually become public property.
      • fallingknife 3y ago
        Why? The toll rates don't seem out of line with similar publicly financed bridges. https://www.ambassadorbridge.com/auto-toll-rates/ https://www.ambassadorbridge.com/auto-toll-rates/
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          They are if they are the result of an artificial monopoly and there is an alternative on the drawing board with better rates. In general infrastructure should be free to use, toll is friction on commerce and development.
• brightball 3y ago
  I agree with you. The bridge didn’t exist and a private company saw a need, so they built it. Clearly the private company was right considering the volume of trade that moves over it. Government planners have their own priorities, but it doesn’t mean it’s the only way. Waiting for central planners to make decisions as the ONLY way is always bad.
  • jacquesm 3y ago
    That was fine. What wasn't fine is then to try to manipulate both the American and the Canadian government to stop building additional bridges. And it almost worked.
    • brightball 3y ago
      On one hand I want to be outraged, but on the other I realize that corporate lobbying does this every day in other industries to try to lock out potential competitors and protect their territory. I don’t like it, but it’s pretty standard.
      • bombcar 3y ago
        It also happens the other way (but less attention is paid to it) - government bureaucrats will throw roadblocks ahead of attempts to build companies that they feel threaten their jobs. It's usually low-key and less obvious. You can blame the public, as you always can do in a democracy, but the reality is that there's only a limited amount of attention and outrage available, so if people "don't care" about something, it's easy enough to postpone it indefinitely. Usually some sort of disaster eventually brings it to the forefront and then the issues are solved. Many major infrastructure projects are this way - it's held up in court and other areas for decades, until a nearby bridge collapses, and then suddenly it's greenlit and moves forward.
      • latexr 3y ago
        Why does it being standard prevent you from being outraged? On the contrary, it should make you more furious that it’s normalised. Plenty of bad things used to be standard: slavery¹, doctors not washing hands between handling cadavers and assisting in births², radioactive children’s toys³, throwing feces out the window⁴. As a society we should aim to discontinue or change those standards to something better, but we can’t do it if we shrug our shoulders because something is already commonplace. That only makes the situation worse, as the industries which take advantage of that complacency and lack of information continue to thrive. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis ³ https://www.energy.gov/lm/articles/holiday-toy-shopping-during-1950s-looked-bit-different-during-2020s https://www.energy.gov/lm/articles/holiday-toy-shopping-duri... ³ Alright, not that one: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/12/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-throw-excrement-out-windows.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/12/did-people-in-the-m...
• theluketaylor 3y ago
  Food distribution is an actual market with competition. A bridge over a river is a natural monopoly that Moroun abused like crazy to his personal enrichment. Canadian, not American and we tend to have a much more government-friendly position. I view public ownership of natural monopolies as vitally important. Then private enterprise can fairly compete in a reasonably regulated way to deliver services via that publicly owned infrastructure (like food distribution). When private entities own the infrastructure they can hold the entire society hostage, which was exactly what happened with the Ambassador Bridge.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    This makes me laugh. Canada is the most anti competition, everything is a monopoly country in the world. That is why food prices and telecom bills are so high. The govt owns nothing. This is another major failure of Canada.
    • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Exactly this. People on the right in Canada like to blame all this on "socialism", but it's really the opposite. The state in Canada has always been captured by private interests, for the purpose of enforcing monopolies. Sometimes justified by nationalism (protectionism relative to the massive US economy next door), sometimes justified by expediency, but almost always working in some private sector interest at the expense of the public's. In the west it's the oil & gas sector (or forestry), in Central Canada its banking, service, and manufacturing. The reality is we have very little "socialism" in Canada, and a whole lot of corporatism which has worn a liberal facade for its own survival. It dates back to colonial times, we just replaced the British colonial parasites with our own local ones.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • lvass 3y ago
    This bridge is far from a natural monopoly, as the border is considerably long. The justice system however, which allowed the bridge owner to maintain his unnatural monopoly, is publicly owned.
• marcosdumay 3y ago
  AFAIK, the problem is much more with the "single" part than with the "privately owned" one.
• pixl97 3y ago
  This case shouldn't be an exception..., it should never have been a private bridge in the first place, along with 100s of other things that corporations have taken private control of. A lot of lobbying is done to get people to believe the government is bad at everything and that corporate rent seeking should be the defacto way a country is run. And lots of people dying from lack of affordable health care believe it.
  • fallingknife 3y ago
    They didn't take control of it, they raised the money and built it because the government didn't want to fund it. > However neither Ontario nor Michigan wanted to finance a river crossing. Michigan automakers subsequently decided to take the initiative to connect the Midwest to central Canada. After they created a bridge company, the project got into trouble when a Toronto financier hired to sell its securities instead embezzled the money and ran off, before ultimately committing suicide in a prison cell after conviction for murdering a drugstore clerk. The bridge boosters turned to New Yorker Joseph A. Bower, a businessman who specialized in rescuing mismanaged companies. Bower succeeded in raising the necessary initial $12 million. "The only way things can be done today, is by private business," said Henry Ford, who backed the project.[15] The bridge was constructed with investment from Detroit business people incorporated as the Detroit International Bridge Corporation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambassador_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambassador_Bridge
• icegreentea2 3y ago
  I think it's the international and infrastructure aspect that is heightening reactions? For example seaports (or at least LA and NYC) are broadly operated by government (or government owned) organizations. The St Lawrence seaway is operated by government or government owned organizations. US airports are generally operated by publicly owned organizations.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• argiopetech 3y ago
  Commenting on your edit, the founding principle of the United States is that government (particularly Federal) is untrustworthy and should be as small and as hamstrung as possible. Americans lost the battle for small government, but not the distrust.
  • kasey_junk 3y ago
    That is an extremely simplified view of the founding principles of the US. The federalists were a pretty well known contingent of the founding fathers as well.
    • argiopetech 3y ago
      Of course, it's two sentences on HN where I'm as likely to be down voted to oblivion as anything else... This said, the Federalists also argued that a Bill of Rights wouldn't be necessary because good governments don't infringe the rights of the people and nothing in the Constitution allowed them to. Turns out they were wildly optimistic, like every project/ideology that relies on a unbounded set of humans to be rational, forward-thinking, altruistic, unselfish, etc. for more than a day or three for success.
      • tptacek 3y ago
        But that's just, like, your opinion man. It's not actually one of the founding principles of the country. Even when they were talking about limiting the powers of the federal government explicitly, as in Federalist 45, they were talking about devolving it out to the states. The Bill of Rights didn't even apply to the states for almost 100 years after Madison.
        • argiopetech 3y ago
          Second paragraph of "Common Sense" (1775): "... Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil;". Second article of the Articles of Confederation (1777): Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled. Those powers delegated were foreign diplomacy and declaration of war, minting of coinage, and resolving disputes among/between the states. Pretty "small government" stuff. In fact, the entire purpose of the Constitution (pushed by the Federalists, opposed by the Anti-Federalists, including many of the founding fathers) was to centralize power and remove it from the states. That's why the second article of the Articles of Confederation (where Article I is the name of the country) guarantee sovereignty of the states, but a similar guarantee is not seen in the Constitution until the 10th amendment (all of which amendments were opposed by the Federalists). The Federalists papers are just the opinions of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay (which is not to diminish them entirely, only to apply needed perspective). The powers were almost entirely with the states at that time, so the papers are mostly convincing the states to give that power up. It was the first step away from the small federal government of the founders.
• bigbillheck 3y ago
  > can be privately own too? Maybe they shouldn't be.
• mc32 3y ago
  I think the problem isn’t private ownership nor the tolls; we have lots of private infrastructure including roads and rail, and historically we also had roads, bridges, barges, etc. The problem is the company lobbying against competition (a parallel bridge).
• btbuildem 3y ago
  I think the american anti-government stance comes partly from the fact that most citizens are not represented by the government, and their taxes are not used in a way that benefits them. Effectively, it's more of a feudal system than a "democracy", where majority of the taxes go to fund a standing army and to (corporate) lords to do with as they please.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]