4 ms·

The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The exception is companies propped up by governm

The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The exception is companies propped up by government regulation. The problem with modern big companies is that the exception has become the rule. Regulation is so pervasive it's become a "what the hell is water" situation. People don't even recognize that the dysfunctional companies are protected from failure by the government. Seemingly beneficial regulations create barriers to entry that prevent dysfunctional companies from being replaced. IP law, even copyright (in its current, out-of-control practically perpetual form) is regulation that protects large incumbents in media and tech and other sectors from competition.

suddenlybananas 2y ago
Delusion belief in market forces that completely ignores the reality when companies reach monopoly status.
- airstrike 2y ago
  Even if that were true, by definition not every company reaches monopoly status, so all others can fail too, unlike the government, so this argument against the GP's claim does not hold.
- modeless 2y ago
  We have antitrust law for that. But antitrust law today is simply overwhelmed by the huge number of monopolies and oligopolies the government has created in almost every sector. And courts don't have the power to correct the problem by reducing the regulations that protected the monopolies in the first place, making their remedies temporary.
  - Volundr 2y ago
    I agree with the first part of your statement but disagree quite strongly with the idea that the government created them. Monopolies and oligopolies are the natural product of unchecked capitalism. Without government activily enforcing antitrust and breaking up monopolies you naturally end up with companies having a stranglehold on their sector.
- Vaslo 2y ago
  You’re right in that government is a monopoly in most cases.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
IgorPartola 2y ago
A company that makes birthday party banners that fails can be replaced. If your electric company runs itself into the ground, there is no replacement without government assistance. So why add the overhead of a for profit company?
- esafak 2y ago
  The last mile might be monopolized, but you are oversimplifying it. When implemented well, there are markets for generation, transmission, distribution, and retail, implying alternatives and resiliency. Every system has bottlenecks. This does not mean they are all equally resilient. To give a familiar example, your having one brain does not negate the benefit of having limbs in pairs.
  - sbarre 2y ago
    > When implemented well Here's the important part. Regulatory capture and monopolies don't want or need things to be implemented well, because that leads to alternative options.
    - esafak 2y ago
      That is true of any complex endeavor. People have to do their jobs properly, and the system should be set up with consideration. There are no shortcuts to success. Policy needs to be bulwarked against the problems you mentioned.
  - IgorPartola 2y ago
    I live in CT where most of the power is supplied by Eversource. Whenever there is a big storm that knocks out power (happens every few years) to most of the state they are never prepared even though they are mandated every time to prepare more than the last time. And after they restore the power the delivery charge goes up. At this point the delivery charge is more than half the cost and our electricity is north of $0.30 per kWh and keeps going up. Even if you switch generation companies your cost doesn’t actually go down significantly overall due to the delivery charges. Moreover, Eversource has their hands in any solar projects. They drag out the process to approve any installations and fight you tooth and nail to make sure you can’t install a big enough system because they are mandated to buy electricity at the same rate as they sell it. They fully captured the market and are essential to the state’s functioning so whenever there is an issue the government backs them. When there isn’t, they post billions in profits. What part of that sounds correct to you?
Volundr 2y ago
I'd argue the difference between private companies and government is that in government that spending is public. Spend a few mil on something of marginal utility, politicaly controversial, or funding a study for something that seems obvious? Congratulations! Fox News found it on USASpending.gov (maybe not now that 18F is dead), and is drumming up outrage. Now your fielding phone calls from senators who are looking to grandstand by reducing your budget. Waste a few million on a Salesforce implementation that never works, never does what it promised and never gains adoption and is finally quietly abandoned? Doesn't even make the Shareholder meeting and the exec in question gets even more influence for his ability to lead large projects.
- trainsarebetter 2y ago
  In theory I guess, but hasn’t all this gov spending essentially been hidden? If doge finding are true? (And in which now I guess it is public)
  - Volundr 2y ago
    Honestly it's hard to guess what your talking about here. As far as things the administration has used as examples they are pretty much all incorrect (e.x. condoms for Hamas) or wildly distorted so I wouldn't call it a win for transparency, or revealing something "essentially hidden". If your talking things like their "org chart"* maybe, sort of. There's nothing there that wasn't already available pretty easily via OPM, but one could argue it's a nicer interface. To the extent that it's actually revealed anything to anyone is argue that it has more to do with it being the trending news so people actually bother to look, rather than it being "hidden" before. https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106601b01b90 https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106...
  - troupo 2y ago
    Almost nothing DOGE has found is true, or as bad as DOGE implies
  - jghn 2y ago
    One could argue that things were *more* transparent pre-DOGE. Just because people didn't know where to look doesn't mean the information didn't exist.
microtonal 2y ago
The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Even if that is true, in some areas companies' interests strongly misalign with that of citizens. An insurance company earns more by rejecting customer declarations. An ISP earns more by giving customers less bandwidth for a higher price. A toll road company earns more by doing as little maintenance they can get away with, while keeping prices high. Yes, in a perfect market, customers will flock to competitors that are better for them. However, in many cases a perfect market is not attainable for various reasons. E.g. because the cost of entry is too high (e.g. making a competing ISP would require you to put your own fiber in the ground) or because there are network effects that are nearly impossible to break. This is why certain markets need strong regulation or government monopolies -- to protect people from pure profit seeking. Health care is a good example. Health care in Western Europe is much better, while less money is spent on health care. This is because health care is strongly regulated and insurance companies cannot f*ck over customers. The objective function of maximizing profits becomes a constrained optimization problem, which generally leads to other ways to increase profits, like pressuring pharmaceutical companies to lower prices of medicines.
- plagiarist 2y ago
  The theory of capitalism leading to efficient markets makes a great deal of assumptions that are simply not true in the real world. Even for elastic goods that nobody needs to participate in at all, let alone an inelastic good like healthcare where people will pay pretty much anything for themselves or their family members to continue living.
  - conception 2y ago
    People also equate capitalism with free markets and attribute a lot of the success of capitalism mistakenly because of it.
  - Jcowell 2y ago
    I think it’s true , it just that sometimes companies become the market
  - 2y ago
juujian 2y ago
Except for too big to fail companies, that is...
baby_souffle 2y ago
What about things that no private company could do or would at least find profitable? I’m think of ‘free’ healthcare or even keeping the nukes in working condition. Are either of those endeavors necessary? Are they profitable? Should they be profitable?
consumer451 2y ago
> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The US healthcare system is evidence that this is an overly simplistic view. In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it. In a for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered shareholder value, and we work to increase it.
- tmoertel 2y ago
  > In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it. That’s cute. But the reality is often closer to this version: In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, so we give it to ourselves and find a way to call it patient care.
  - hello_moto 2y ago
    Or you can put them in contingency fund... That's not hard... US is the richest nation with poor healthcare. Think about that...
  - jopicornell 2y ago
    That's not how it works in countries with fully subsidized healtcare. It seems you are biased towards some intents that have been done in USA to subsidize some part, in a perverse, privatized and corrupt system. In Spain it is the privatization of the healthcare that is "given to themselves and call it patient care", making politician friends (and politicians themselves) richer and corrupt, and selling it as a way to "fix the healthcare" that they are breaking.
  - consumer451 2y ago
    > In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, so we give it to ourselves and find a way to call it patient care. Can you share some significant real-world examples of this happening?
encomiast 2y ago
Private companies don't always just fail and get replaced. They find other ways of making profits, like selling user data, externalizing risk, or your run-of-the-mill enshitification.
nobodyandproud 2y ago
> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Only—and this is a critical detail—if the market is competitive. Otherwise, a government entity answerable to elected officials at some level is more efficient.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fleventynine 2y ago
> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Unfortunately, there isn't enough competition for this to be true. In many markets the largest incumbents are able to build a moat to stop smaller, smarter companies from competing. Sometimes this is regulatory capture, but it can also be that the market is a natural winner-take-all market, and in that case well-thought-out regulation can be necessary to enforce competition. Venture capitalists shy away from funding companies that want to compete in a well established market. They view it as a race to the bottom with no huge payout. Once a company is large and well established, it can be as bloated and inefficient as any government, and it will extract rent with it's IP, real-estate, and means-of-production for decades before it has to worry about failure.
rawgabbit 2y ago
In technology we see this is not true. Windows blue screens and brings the economy to a halt. Azure and windows is riddled with security gaffes. But everyone looks the other way. Google search is nothing but ads but the majority still use it. A clue to why this dysfunctional market exists is all the tech CEOs pay homage to the Oval Office and shove monies into untraceable PACs thanks to Citizens United.
- modeless 2y ago
  See, this is exactly the "what the hell is water" problem. You think Microsoft's monopoly on Windows is a result of the "free market", and simply take it for granted when the government literally, explicitly, intentionally grants Microsoft their monopoly on Windows via copyright.
sensanaty 2y ago
> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Have we really already forgotten "Too big to fail"? It wasn't that long ago that those words were uttered and the US gov't bailed out failing private companies with taxpayer money. And on the topic of profitability that pops up in these discussions, what about public transport? Healhcare? Power plants? Nuclear weapons maintenance? Should these be "profitable"? Is profit supposed to be the be-all-end-all state for everything? Because from where I'm standing, profit incentives make the world an actively worse place when it's free from oversight and regulation. If it were up to Nestle, the entire planet would be a giant reservoir only they could draw water from in order to produce soda. If it were up to Chiquita, all of South America would be a giant banana plantation to the point where they funded actual paramilitary organizations to achieve that goal. The most profitable route for most companies is the route that is objectively worse for everyone involved minus the shareholders that reap the profits from their antisocial, short-term-minded destructive behaviors.
- arcanemachiner 2y ago
  > Have we really already forgotten "Too big to fail"? The entirety of the GP's post (other than the part you quoted) addresses that exact point.
wbl 2y ago
Government absolutely fixes things that aren't doing their job. However typically the job needs to keep getting done in that whole process.
analog31 2y ago
>>> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Like health care and higher education?
boothby 2y ago
I can't wait until highways and roads are carved up and sold to oligarchs. Every mile driven is a microtransaction (or maybe not so micro, if it's a monopoly). Maintenance is a major cost center, so they'll minimize that in a race to the bottom. Companies in disaster areas will simply fail, because insurance is expensive! It's such a beautiful system. I can't wait for this tax-free utopia. Canada and Mexico will be happy to buy some of your failed states.
- alistairSH 2y ago
  Wait? We’re anlready there… All the new HOV lanes around DC are public-private partnerships with flex tolls that are paid by the mile. And have revenue protection for the private entity built in.
  - boothby 2y ago
    State highways are well maintained because the federal government demands it in exchange for significant funding derived from federal gas tax. You've had a taste of utopia, but you haven't bathed in it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund
Centigonal 2y ago
So why haven't we replaced Boeing? UHG? the "too big to fail" banks? I would argue that replacing a private company that performs a critical government function poorly is actually more difficult than eliminating and reforming an agency like USAID or ICE.
chriskanan 2y ago
I agree with everything in your comment about regulation. However, if you are implying that only companies, and not nations, can fail and be replaced, I'd disagree. This has happened many times in the past. I really liked this history video on the topic, which is rooted in how the founders of the USA were very familiar with a theory about how that happens called anacyclosis and they had originally designed the constitution to avoid that, where the theory proposes that democracies tend to dissolve when a populist demagogue takes over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY James Madison and Alexander Hamilton both very much feared that allowing the public to vote for more than members of the House of Representatives would eventually lead to the "uninformed, overly emotional public" to elect a demagogue.
n3storm 2y ago
Reality at least in Europe is big companies come from big burguesse families and they know how to masquerade themselves in order to keep being attached to government (no matter the color). Like oligarchy in disguise.
nickpinkston 2y ago
This can be true, but also many of these companies are themselves essentially monopolies that also don't face market pressure - such as Visa, Comcast, etc. You can say this is due to corporatism, which is often true as well, but gov't regulation is required for natural monopolies. This is to avoid issues like the early railroad boom where they hugely overbuilt, a lot of them went under and/or eventually coalesced into a few monopolies, which needed regulation to prevent them squeezing their customers to death. The best markets are sensibly regulated. It's a balance, not a binary.
madeofpalk 2y ago
> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced Maybe they can, but they just as often don't. How much 'waste and useless things' do you think is at Microsoft or Google, yet is financially insulated due to their outrageous success elsewhere.
TFYS 2y ago
With private companies there's a lot of inefficiency that comes from having to have competition. Without competition you'll have monopolies, and combined with the profit motive those are a disaster. But to enable competition you need to have multiple organizations doing exactly the same thing. That's a lot of unnecessary "overhead cost" that you get by having duplicate products, duplicate management, duplicate HR, duplicate everything. You also have to build a brand, do marketing and other competition related things that don't actually contribute to the product itself and which would be mostly unnecessary without competition. Add to all that the overhead cost that is profit and the amount of waste in a public organization whose goal is not profit and that doesn't need to compete doesn't sound so bad.
EasyMark 2y ago
The same thing can be done in bureaucracies with auditing/inspector offices. What DOGE should be rather than Leon and Dump's revenge tour. I don't think people are against an auditing office with a lot of power; they're against a billionaire who will only be enriched by it and a President who is using it to get revenge on imagined slights. That's why we're angry at the clown circus that is DOGE. Also they are doing things that only Congress has the power to do. The only thing saving them is the blitzkrieg tactics. All of it will be undone by courts, but a lot of damage will be have been done already by Big Bawlz

suddenlybananas 2y ago

Delusion belief in market forces that completely ignores the reality when companies reach monopoly status.

airstrike 2y ago
Even if that were true, by definition not every company reaches monopoly status, so all others can fail too, unlike the government, so this argument against the GP's claim does not hold.
modeless 2y ago
We have antitrust law for that. But antitrust law today is simply overwhelmed by the huge number of monopolies and oligopolies the government has created in almost every sector. And courts don't have the power to correct the problem by reducing the regulations that protected the monopolies in the first place, making their remedies temporary.
- Volundr 2y ago
  I agree with the first part of your statement but disagree quite strongly with the idea that the government created them. Monopolies and oligopolies are the natural product of unchecked capitalism. Without government activily enforcing antitrust and breaking up monopolies you naturally end up with companies having a stranglehold on their sector.
Vaslo 2y ago
You’re right in that government is a monopoly in most cases.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

IgorPartola 2y ago

A company that makes birthday party banners that fails can be replaced. If your electric company runs itself into the ground, there is no replacement without government assistance. So why add the overhead of a for profit company?

esafak 2y ago
The last mile might be monopolized, but you are oversimplifying it. When implemented well, there are markets for generation, transmission, distribution, and retail, implying alternatives and resiliency. Every system has bottlenecks. This does not mean they are all equally resilient. To give a familiar example, your having one brain does not negate the benefit of having limbs in pairs.
- sbarre 2y ago
  > When implemented well Here's the important part. Regulatory capture and monopolies don't want or need things to be implemented well, because that leads to alternative options.
  - esafak 2y ago
    That is true of any complex endeavor. People have to do their jobs properly, and the system should be set up with consideration. There are no shortcuts to success. Policy needs to be bulwarked against the problems you mentioned.
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  I live in CT where most of the power is supplied by Eversource. Whenever there is a big storm that knocks out power (happens every few years) to most of the state they are never prepared even though they are mandated every time to prepare more than the last time. And after they restore the power the delivery charge goes up. At this point the delivery charge is more than half the cost and our electricity is north of $0.30 per kWh and keeps going up. Even if you switch generation companies your cost doesn’t actually go down significantly overall due to the delivery charges. Moreover, Eversource has their hands in any solar projects. They drag out the process to approve any installations and fight you tooth and nail to make sure you can’t install a big enough system because they are mandated to buy electricity at the same rate as they sell it. They fully captured the market and are essential to the state’s functioning so whenever there is an issue the government backs them. When there isn’t, they post billions in profits. What part of that sounds correct to you?

Volundr 2y ago

I'd argue the difference between private companies and government is that in government that spending is public. Spend a few mil on something of marginal utility, politicaly controversial, or funding a study for something that seems obvious? Congratulations! Fox News found it on USASpending.gov (maybe not now that 18F is dead), and is drumming up outrage. Now your fielding phone calls from senators who are looking to grandstand by reducing your budget. Waste a few million on a Salesforce implementation that never works, never does what it promised and never gains adoption and is finally quietly abandoned? Doesn't even make the Shareholder meeting and the exec in question gets even more influence for his ability to lead large projects.

trainsarebetter 2y ago
In theory I guess, but hasn’t all this gov spending essentially been hidden? If doge finding are true? (And in which now I guess it is public)
- Volundr 2y ago
  Honestly it's hard to guess what your talking about here. As far as things the administration has used as examples they are pretty much all incorrect (e.x. condoms for Hamas) or wildly distorted so I wouldn't call it a win for transparency, or revealing something "essentially hidden". If your talking things like their "org chart"* maybe, sort of. There's nothing there that wasn't already available pretty easily via OPM, but one could argue it's a nicer interface. To the extent that it's actually revealed anything to anyone is argue that it has more to do with it being the trending news so people actually bother to look, rather than it being "hidden" before. https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106601b01b90 https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106...
- troupo 2y ago
  Almost nothing DOGE has found is true, or as bad as DOGE implies
- jghn 2y ago
  One could argue that things were *more* transparent pre-DOGE. Just because people didn't know where to look doesn't mean the information didn't exist.

microtonal 2y ago

The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Even if that is true, in some areas companies' interests strongly misalign with that of citizens. An insurance company earns more by rejecting customer declarations. An ISP earns more by giving customers less bandwidth for a higher price. A toll road company earns more by doing as little maintenance they can get away with, while keeping prices high. Yes, in a perfect market, customers will flock to competitors that are better for them. However, in many cases a perfect market is not attainable for various reasons. E.g. because the cost of entry is too high (e.g. making a competing ISP would require you to put your own fiber in the ground) or because there are network effects that are nearly impossible to break. This is why certain markets need strong regulation or government monopolies -- to protect people from pure profit seeking. Health care is a good example. Health care in Western Europe is much better, while less money is spent on health care. This is because health care is strongly regulated and insurance companies cannot f*ck over customers. The objective function of maximizing profits becomes a constrained optimization problem, which generally leads to other ways to increase profits, like pressuring pharmaceutical companies to lower prices of medicines.

plagiarist 2y ago
The theory of capitalism leading to efficient markets makes a great deal of assumptions that are simply not true in the real world. Even for elastic goods that nobody needs to participate in at all, let alone an inelastic good like healthcare where people will pay pretty much anything for themselves or their family members to continue living.
- conception 2y ago
  People also equate capitalism with free markets and attribute a lot of the success of capitalism mistakenly because of it.
- Jcowell 2y ago
  I think it’s true , it just that sometimes companies become the market
- 2y ago

juujian 2y ago

Except for too big to fail companies, that is...

baby_souffle 2y ago

What about things that no private company could do or would at least find profitable? I’m think of ‘free’ healthcare or even keeping the nukes in working condition. Are either of those endeavors necessary? Are they profitable? Should they be profitable?

consumer451 2y ago

> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The US healthcare system is evidence that this is an overly simplistic view. In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it. In a for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered shareholder value, and we work to increase it.

tmoertel 2y ago
> In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it. That’s cute. But the reality is often closer to this version: In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, so we give it to ourselves and find a way to call it patient care.
- hello_moto 2y ago
  Or you can put them in contingency fund... That's not hard... US is the richest nation with poor healthcare. Think about that...
- jopicornell 2y ago
  That's not how it works in countries with fully subsidized healtcare. It seems you are biased towards some intents that have been done in USA to subsidize some part, in a perverse, privatized and corrupt system. In Spain it is the privatization of the healthcare that is "given to themselves and call it patient care", making politician friends (and politicians themselves) richer and corrupt, and selling it as a way to "fix the healthcare" that they are breaking.
- consumer451 2y ago
  > In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, so we give it to ourselves and find a way to call it patient care. Can you share some significant real-world examples of this happening?

encomiast 2y ago

Private companies don't always just fail and get replaced. They find other ways of making profits, like selling user data, externalizing risk, or your run-of-the-mill enshitification.

nobodyandproud 2y ago

> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Only—and this is a critical detail—if the market is competitive. Otherwise, a government entity answerable to elected officials at some level is more efficient.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

fleventynine 2y ago

> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Unfortunately, there isn't enough competition for this to be true. In many markets the largest incumbents are able to build a moat to stop smaller, smarter companies from competing. Sometimes this is regulatory capture, but it can also be that the market is a natural winner-take-all market, and in that case well-thought-out regulation can be necessary to enforce competition. Venture capitalists shy away from funding companies that want to compete in a well established market. They view it as a race to the bottom with no huge payout. Once a company is large and well established, it can be as bloated and inefficient as any government, and it will extract rent with it's IP, real-estate, and means-of-production for decades before it has to worry about failure.

rawgabbit 2y ago

In technology we see this is not true. Windows blue screens and brings the economy to a halt. Azure and windows is riddled with security gaffes. But everyone looks the other way. Google search is nothing but ads but the majority still use it. A clue to why this dysfunctional market exists is all the tech CEOs pay homage to the Oval Office and shove monies into untraceable PACs thanks to Citizens United.

modeless 2y ago
See, this is exactly the "what the hell is water" problem. You think Microsoft's monopoly on Windows is a result of the "free market", and simply take it for granted when the government literally, explicitly, intentionally grants Microsoft their monopoly on Windows via copyright.

sensanaty 2y ago

> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Have we really already forgotten "Too big to fail"? It wasn't that long ago that those words were uttered and the US gov't bailed out failing private companies with taxpayer money. And on the topic of profitability that pops up in these discussions, what about public transport? Healhcare? Power plants? Nuclear weapons maintenance? Should these be "profitable"? Is profit supposed to be the be-all-end-all state for everything? Because from where I'm standing, profit incentives make the world an actively worse place when it's free from oversight and regulation. If it were up to Nestle, the entire planet would be a giant reservoir only they could draw water from in order to produce soda. If it were up to Chiquita, all of South America would be a giant banana plantation to the point where they funded actual paramilitary organizations to achieve that goal. The most profitable route for most companies is the route that is objectively worse for everyone involved minus the shareholders that reap the profits from their antisocial, short-term-minded destructive behaviors.

arcanemachiner 2y ago
> Have we really already forgotten "Too big to fail"? The entirety of the GP's post (other than the part you quoted) addresses that exact point.

wbl 2y ago

Government absolutely fixes things that aren't doing their job. However typically the job needs to keep getting done in that whole process.

analog31 2y ago

>>> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Like health care and higher education?

boothby 2y ago

I can't wait until highways and roads are carved up and sold to oligarchs. Every mile driven is a microtransaction (or maybe not so micro, if it's a monopoly). Maintenance is a major cost center, so they'll minimize that in a race to the bottom. Companies in disaster areas will simply fail, because insurance is expensive! It's such a beautiful system. I can't wait for this tax-free utopia. Canada and Mexico will be happy to buy some of your failed states.

alistairSH 2y ago
Wait? We’re anlready there… All the new HOV lanes around DC are public-private partnerships with flex tolls that are paid by the mile. And have revenue protection for the private entity built in.
- boothby 2y ago
  State highways are well maintained because the federal government demands it in exchange for significant funding derived from federal gas tax. You've had a taste of utopia, but you haven't bathed in it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund

Centigonal 2y ago

So why haven't we replaced Boeing? UHG? the "too big to fail" banks? I would argue that replacing a private company that performs a critical government function poorly is actually more difficult than eliminating and reforming an agency like USAID or ICE.

chriskanan 2y ago

I agree with everything in your comment about regulation. However, if you are implying that only companies, and not nations, can fail and be replaced, I'd disagree. This has happened many times in the past. I really liked this history video on the topic, which is rooted in how the founders of the USA were very familiar with a theory about how that happens called anacyclosis and they had originally designed the constitution to avoid that, where the theory proposes that democracies tend to dissolve when a populist demagogue takes over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY James Madison and Alexander Hamilton both very much feared that allowing the public to vote for more than members of the House of Representatives would eventually lead to the "uninformed, overly emotional public" to elect a demagogue.

n3storm 2y ago

Reality at least in Europe is big companies come from big burguesse families and they know how to masquerade themselves in order to keep being attached to government (no matter the color). Like oligarchy in disguise.

nickpinkston 2y ago

This can be true, but also many of these companies are themselves essentially monopolies that also don't face market pressure - such as Visa, Comcast, etc. You can say this is due to corporatism, which is often true as well, but gov't regulation is required for natural monopolies. This is to avoid issues like the early railroad boom where they hugely overbuilt, a lot of them went under and/or eventually coalesced into a few monopolies, which needed regulation to prevent them squeezing their customers to death. The best markets are sensibly regulated. It's a balance, not a binary.

madeofpalk 2y ago

> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced Maybe they can, but they just as often don't. How much 'waste and useless things' do you think is at Microsoft or Google, yet is financially insulated due to their outrageous success elsewhere.

TFYS 2y ago

With private companies there's a lot of inefficiency that comes from having to have competition. Without competition you'll have monopolies, and combined with the profit motive those are a disaster. But to enable competition you need to have multiple organizations doing exactly the same thing. That's a lot of unnecessary "overhead cost" that you get by having duplicate products, duplicate management, duplicate HR, duplicate everything. You also have to build a brand, do marketing and other competition related things that don't actually contribute to the product itself and which would be mostly unnecessary without competition. Add to all that the overhead cost that is profit and the amount of waste in a public organization whose goal is not profit and that doesn't need to compete doesn't sound so bad.

EasyMark 2y ago

The same thing can be done in bureaucracies with auditing/inspector offices. What DOGE should be rather than Leon and Dump's revenge tour. I don't think people are against an auditing office with a lot of power; they're against a billionaire who will only be enriched by it and a President who is using it to get revenge on imagined slights. That's why we're angry at the clown circus that is DOGE. Also they are doing things that only Congress has the power to do. The only thing saving them is the blitzkrieg tactics. All of it will be undone by courts, but a lot of damage will be have been done already by Big Bawlz