h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Of course the obvious ones would be for instance, the Weather Service or (in some countries) health care. No one would argue for total deregulation in sport!

Libertarians and Supply Side Economists (trickle down) would argue that very few should be *socialised* or regulated, while others point to globalisation and the need to regulate nationally to control globally.

So, what do you think? Examples?

Healthcare; education; any important public infrastructure (water, electricity, sewerage, public transport) should not be fully privatised: regulation should ensure equality of access (except in the extreme cases of people living on top of mountains).

I have heard people arguing for privatisation of security: police and army. Such people are obviously completely out of touch with reality.

TRiG.

In this corner of the colonies our provincial government seems hell bent on privatising electricity and our national government would like nothing better than privatising health care. Nothing but public sentiment is holding them back, I fear.

I agree about the police and army- how did mercenaries get involved in Iraq and Afghanistan? They just seemed to suddenly be there.

I assumed the mercenaries were there to do the things that the US and UK wanted done, but did not want to be held accountable for.

Zoomer, have a look at NZ's privatisation of electricity if you want many good reasons for not doing it

Just googled it. Here we have debt but that's not why they are doing it- they're Trickle Down conservatives masquerading as Liberals getting piles of dough from big corporations. Living next to the US can be risky! We're tied together by economy, water, power, oceans, roads, pipelines and airspace. Tough to stay independent, we did with health care and now _it's_ being assailed.

All of them, should never be touched by the evil and utter mess-everything-up-ness that is privitisation.
Just in the UK I can't think of a single one that ever worked. All cost the tax payers a fortune, and continue to do so, in order to make already rich people richer via the share selling off of them.
The UK has comitted itself to never having a fuly functioning safe railway network though its privitasation; yet the UK gov hence the tax payers still fund it to some level,; basically feels great to know my taxes are being given to the share holders and directors of a private company, so they can charge me excessive amounts if I want to do anything so stupid as want to travel by train;
The virtual total loss of control over teh rail network has effectively ment the UK can never fully have a joined up means of delivering a national transport policy that does anything except rely on everyone having a car... Quite how that fits in with things... oh, it doesn't.
Electric and gas. total sell out of something that was worth far more, even at the point when it was sold, than what it was sold for. Nice little profet of a few million or whatever for the major investors in its launch into the stock market.
and... years, decades later, the UK government now helps fund this privitised essential service, not least through the winter fuel payouts to the elderly, again just give the tax money to share holders, why not, I mean, they're already rich so makes sense to make them richer, and year-on-year, see the poorest people in society paying an ever increasing amount of their income out to just enable them to have gas, electric, water and sewage..

2legs >>Just in the UK I can't think of a single one that ever worked.

I can. BT. Only one I can think of. But it did work and there no reason for it to be public ownership.


Water is the one that jumps out as something oughtn't be in private ownership, they're regional monopolies, there is no switching supplier for "customers" and near no incentive for the companies to respond to complaints or invest.

I'd say that any service or sector that requires a monopoly to deliver should be in state hands.

But how would you decide which one "require" a monopoly to deliver? Can't you always declare that several companies can share the delivering, and Bob's your uncle?

re BT, who owns the phone lines and other infrastructure in the UK?

Richard Branson? Rupert Murdoch?

'Natural' monopolies are industries where the costs of having 2 or more firms are much higher than just having one, usually because of the infrastructure involved. So it's things like railways, telephone networks, gas, electricity and so on.

As for BT, I think they own the infrastructure (the exchanges, actual phone lines etc) which they rent to providers (including themselves). I remember reading that the 'natural' part of the monopoly is just the infrastructure. Dem free-market types wanted competition on the delivery of the service, so introduced competition wherever possible.

You've got to be kidding.
BT is a prime example of an utter cock up in the long term view of privitising something the country used to own.
Hence why the UK is rapidly moving to fall behind other countrys in the digital era, with vast parts of the country unable to just take part in modern society as BT deem it not commercially viable to put in high speed broadband.
This in itself creates more of a monopoly than ever existed before; a good example being where Ilive I have no choice other than to get my broadband from the cable company, and they won't do broadband unless you have their phone, so I'm forced to get that too, as the cable company was in my area for many years already, there is no commercial reason for BT to develop a decent infastructure there, and so Icna't go with any* other company other than the one cable company; there is only one cable company now in the UK, so that is who I have to go with; If I could have a decent BTphone line then at least Icould go with any one of a number of other companys for my braodband, as well of course, as |BT themselves... as it is, if its cable you have*to use, your automatically forced to be only able to use that cable companys broadband packages, currently costing me about £500 or more per year than even the middle of the companys Icould use if I could have a ordinary landline connection; the infastructure here on the landline is so poor I couldn't get a decent speed; and no, this area is not planned to be upgraded in the next ten years.
And I'm lucky where Ilive; many rural areas don't even have the choice of broadband.
Again, the only people who benifited from the BT privitisaiton were the share holders and directors.
And simularly, from what Irecall of the digital cock up bill (or whatever it was called recently), we the tax payers now have to fund the shareholders even futher as the government is forced to put money directly in the hands of this privitised company, in order to develop some*imrpovement to Braodband; why? all this does is ensure that BT can increase profets, and the dividends to their shareholders; We pay twice; our tax gets used to develop t this new infastructure for BT, and then we pay BT for the prilendge of using what we've just payed to have put in place through the government funding out of general taxation
There isn't either, hardly any choice in the phone market full stop now; a while after privitastion there was some new companys/providers caming on to the market, obviously 'renting' the lines from BT, but the number of those seems to have reduced vastly now...

But, I did recall something.... the err tote is it? they want to privise.... they can privitise that... I mean, no one actually cares about that so that would be fine and only idiots gabmle anyhow

State-run only:

The army - if you want to know why private armies are a bad idea read about what happened to the Roman Republic.

The police - because if policing were left to market forces then peaceable middle-class areas would be brimming with well-paid officers and poorer, more crime-ridden areas would have none.

Fire brigade/ambulance/other emergency services - again, leaving these to market forces would create an abundance of service in rich areas and little to none in poor ones.

Government - well, duh...

There are things I think it's okay to have private "options" on but which should have a state-run "fallback". These include education, electricity, water, TV/radio and healthcare.

As for "regulation". I think most things should be subjected to a certain amount of regulation but I think the followiing should be heavily regulated:

Banking - for obvious recent reasons

Selling addictive substances - tobacco, alcohol et al

Medicine - for what ought to be obvious reasons.

Scientific research - by which I mean science must remain strictly scrutinised, peer-reviewed etc etc

>BT is a prime example of an utter cock up in the long term view of privitising something the country used to own.
Hence why the UK is rapidly moving to fall behind other countrys in the digital era, with vast parts of the country unable to just take part in modern society as BT deem it not commercially viable to put in high speed broadband.

BT is a great example of why a lot of privatisation and opening up to the market hasn't worked in this country. The Conservatives (who pushed such things through) have a marginal obsession typical of their social class - choice. Thing is, though, most people aren't that interested in choosing their electricity provider, or phoneline provider, or gas provider. All they care about is that when they turn on a plug, an appliance comes on; if they lift the phone, they hear the dialing tone. Because of this, the privatised state companies basically kept their monopolies. Most people want choice in things like their beer or what television channel they watch - the notion of "choice" in something like electricity doesn't have similar appeal - it's all the same, really.

Come to think of it, I can't even name another home phone provider. In the early '90s Mercury was supposed to be the "big rival" to BT in the market. I've no idea if they're even still going.

So, instead of loads of companies all driving down prices to compete, BT holds a virtual monopoly (because hardly any of their customers can see the point of changing to another service).

This came out of the problem of ideology versus pragmatism. Privatisation can be (and usually is) a good idea *if the public as a whole is hungry for choice and change*. If they just don't care then you'll be looking at nothing more than a state monopoly being replaced by a private one.

@pedro
"'Natural' monopolies are industries where the costs of having 2 or more firms are much higher than just having one, usually because of the infrastructure involved. So it's things like railways, telephone networks, gas, electricity and so on."

Thanks, I forgot those. Natural monopolies should probably be state-run as well. Although it's debatable whether some of those you cite actually are - gas for instance? I've argued earlier that privatisation/market forces haven't worked with such things at all well but I don't think that's because of the reasons you cite - more that the public doesn't have a strong urge to shop around when getting a provider meaning virtual monopolies form.

Would you call broadband provision a "natural monopoly"? Market competition has worked well there/

BT still largely has the monopoly on the telephone network. BT Wholesale sells the copper and fibre infrastructure to all the other providers apart from small(ish) cable networks. Most places have little option in terms of availability and speed.

t.

zagreb, I'd say broadband would be a natural monopoly, cos basically it's the product of a phone line. Two networks would be horrendously inefficient. As for gas, two gas networks would be far more costly than one, so I'd say it's a natural monopoly.


Or rather, the infrastructure part is a natural monopoly: the previous Tories tried to split monopolies into different areas cos they didn't think the delivery side was one. Can't remember any details though. And hasn't Ofcom been downgraded or something because the market works so well?

In our area we have a choice of two networks - phone line or cable.
Don't mobile phones have a choice of several providers?

The problem with selling off services that one might regard as essential is that the private firms are going to be most interested in urban customers and not those in remote rural areas. When BT lost their monopoly, they were still required to supply public phones & home lines in remote places, whereas the private companies could target the lucrative business customers. Hardly fair competition.