Comment by gergles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gergles | Hacker News Reader

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AT&T was right that telephone service is a natural monopoly. There's still only one set of phone lines running into your house. This trend on HN of expecting every argument to be entirely self-supported and encyclopedic-length, defining everything from first principles, is really quite annoying. You don't win an argument by going "HA HA YOU DIDN'T DEFINE A TERM." If you don't know what a natural monopoly is, go look it the fuck up. Utilities such as telephone service and internet access are the textbook definition of a natural monopoly.

Government run services already have tons of special privileges corporations don't. Try not paying your taxes and see what happens. Regardless, it is my opinion (and I'd believe the article writers would agree with me) that infrastructure is something that is inherently in the public interest and therefore best managed by the public (through government.) You don't drive on four separate interstate systems, you don't have eighteen sets of phone lines running into your house, and you don't have 4 sets of power cables either.

>infrastructure is something that is inherently in the public interest and therefore best managed by the public (through government.)

By this idiot "argument", government should go back to the 1950s through 1970s and start nationalizing railroads, power companies, and oil companies again. How did that work out again?

No it should move forward and privitize the roads.

Particularly it should sell them to different car companies and arrange for them to have a monopoly. So the interstate is usable by anyone who pays but the local roads are GM only and the off ramp where you work is owned by Toyota.

I don't know, let's ask California how their energy prices are doing now that they've been radically deregulated. Let's take a train on our efficient, safe, and inexpensive national rail system there to ask them.

Sigh.

The brownouts a couple years back were because the State deregulated only one side of the market, leaving the sellers of electricity in an untenable position. Essentially, they had to compete to sell on the one hand, but were forbidden from competition on the purchasing side. The problem was entirely (and it's not often one can point a finger at one single cause, but here it is) the fault of ham-fisted State regulation.

The federal rail system is not inexpensive, it's heavily subsidized. Don't start with the per-passenger-mile comparison to highways, because it's wrong: the study failed to account for capital cost in the railway, while counting for it against roads. On the topic of rail, the network of rail in the US was subsidized and built using eminent domain -- yet all of those railroads failed or were merged into others. The one exception, the one railroad that stood on its own without federal strongarming others into supporting it, is the only one that managed to survive until the present day.

Yes, because it worked out so well when governments divested themselves of their local transit systems to private businesses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scanda...

Apples and oranges.

On the one hand, you are talking about a program to privatize a previously-public program. That has nothing to do with the question of whether public entities should enter markets that are already serviced by corporate entities.

Indeed, if anything, it seems to me that your example argues against government getting into business, because of the danger of it being corrupted or subverted, as in your example.

The tendency to require formal or semi-formal logical proof supporting any claims made correlates heavily with Aspergers.

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