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Comment by tribeofone | Hacker News Reader

It was run by progressive policies instead of business principles. This is going to fail too, the same people are going to make the same mistakes. They could not even deliver broadband within the city limits, how are they going to do it statewide? Think Mosquito coast.

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“It was run by progressive policies instead of business principles.“

You should probably elaborate on this. Otherwise it’s an empty statement.

There's no need to run a municipal agency as if it were a private business. What do you imagine the difference between "progressive policies" and "business principals" are?

While "maximize profit" and "deliver shareholder value" are a recipe for predatory behavior when applied to government organizations and government granted monopolies there's definitely a need for municipal departments to pay attention to money input in relation to services output.

I'm unaware of the specific details but I suspect Burlington Telecom lit a bunch of money on fire chasing some noble goal and in the process compromised their ability to do some other key part of their job in a satisfactory manner. This isn't an uncommon failure mode for municipal government departments that suffer scope creep.

It still seems rather vague to attempt to blame "progressive policies" as somehow being opposed to just logical mathematics.

IMO after reading the it, this current plan is pretty far away from Progressive, so I think PC was off base anyway.

Municipal agencies are still bound by the constraints of resource scarcity — and the goal should always be to efficiently provide services to citizens without glut/waste. You're right that municipal agencies shouldn't need to worry about turning a profit, but they should also need to make sure they don't run at a loss.

Isn't the whole point to not run utilities by business principles? I think the idea is to classify some services as "must have for a decent life" and make sure everyone has access to them, regardless of profitability.

What kind of progressive policies are you thinking of?

No, the point is that you no longer need to worry about sending profits to shareholders. "Business principles" are just a catch-all term for ideas that businesses need to co-opt in order to survive, including financial sustainability, effective leadership, producing results, operationalization, etc.

All of these things can and should apply to public utilities.

"Business principles" does encourage a capitalist view into the problem, which necessitates growing capital as profit until you have surplus to invest in further growth. I think that's as far as you need to go with it -- utilities need to "play the game" because they're embedded in a capitalist system, but they are not subject to the same pressures regarding that profit and who decides what to do with it. It's not really a "business vs utility" dichotomy as much as it is a question of "where does the excess money go". You could argue they're the same thing but setting utilities up explicitly as "not businesses" encourages wonks to throw wacky ideas at the problem and doesn't do much to help the operations day to day.

I mean, I don't think we can ever agree because "business principles" is a vague phrase that has no official definition. It can mean whatever you want it to mean.

More fundamentally, capitalist businesses try to maximize output of goods and services to consumers while minimizing the input necessary to create & produce them. The difference between the two, the profit, is the incentive to do more with less. This is how we allocate scarce resources to productive ends.

Municipal agencies are also bound by the constraints of resource scarcity. The goal should always be to efficiently provide services to citizens without glut/waste. You're right that municipal agencies shouldn't need to worry about turning a profit, but they should also need to make sure they don't run at a loss. If the input to a municipal service is (subsidized) price + tax revenue, the outlays of the municipal agency are bound by that input. Bonus points if the municipal agency is able to provide high quality goods & services with lower taxes.

The only way we know to accomplish all of this are through standard management practices which, today, are adopted by capitalist businesses.

Whatever the economic model used, business principles apply. Even pharaohs had to abide by “business principles”. In other words, as 5year plans have borne out, you can’t just make things so. Finite resources, allocation, timelines, balancing many needs effectively.

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