If only the government had nationalised industry, these bugs would be alive?
This situation is covered by the first, though I bet the things that are killing the insects are hurting us, too.
Do you know the history of the Soviet whaling program? They killed more whales for industry than the West.
Contrast that to the concept of a Crown corporation in Canada, which "provide services required by the public that otherwise would not be economically viable as a private enterprise or that do not fit exactly within the scope of any ministry." [0] They can do things like "care about externalities" because they're not expected to make money, but they're still structured as corporations and therefore can have the usual trappings like middle management and competitive salaries and casual Fridays.
A famous example would be the Canadian National Railway, which was created by government fiat in 1918 as a response to a bunch of private railways in (less-developed) western Canada running out of government money to feed on and thereby going bankrupt. The diversity of the interests that it inherited allowed it to spin off all sorts of other beneficial Crown corporations recognized by every Canadian, like VIA Rail, Air Canada, and the CBC.
Of course, the privatization of Crown corporations is also a great way for right-wing governments to create minor budgetary surpluses to enthrall the plebes while handing over a captive "customer"-base to their already-wealthy friends, and since the 80s it's become a proud tradition. [1] Air Canada, Ontario Hydro, Petro-Canada...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_corporations_of_Canada
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_Crown_corporat...
Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though, it is just an organization for providing government services and isn't any different than a typical department of education or post or government rails etc.
I'm sure most agree with you that there are areas best served by government run organizations. Crown corporation just operates in such areas, so it wouldn't change peoples views on what services a government should run at all.
An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry? I also suggest you read the second link in the grandparent: Nova Chemicals, Yara Belle Plaine, PotashCorp, all the resource extraction corps in Saskatchewan...
Also, that's strictly wrong -- Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all, so long as the government chose to endow them to do so. Furthermore, some Crown corporations must deal with real physical externalities arising as a consequence of their operations, like Petro-Canada, which (before it was sold off for a song to already-rich people) extracted real physical oil in Alberta, and dealt with the real physical externalities in a much MUCH *MUCH* more accountable way.
No, they aren't manufacturing anything. Managing natural resources is a reasonable thing for a government to do.
> Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all
But they aren't which is the point. Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would, so using them as an example doesn't work.
> Furthermore, some Crown corporations must deal with real physical externalities arising as a consequence of their operations, like Petro-Canada
There is no reason this couldn't just be done for private corporations via regulations. Politicians have that power today, why aren't they using it? And why do you think they would use it if ownership was different?
It's a historical fact that the government did operate industrial Crown corporations, and they operated them "better", as viewed from the embarrassingly non-fiduciary perspectives of the workers and the environment, which is the point.
>There is no reason this couldn't just be done for private corporations via regulations. Politicians have that power today, why aren't they using it? And why do you think they would use it if ownership was different?
There's several organizations between the legislature in which some regulation is made, and the actual group to be regulated, whereas a Crown corporation's mandate to report directly to the government, not to mention the absent necessity to cover bad things up until the quarterly earnings report drops, makes them more honest. The other kicker, of course, is that private corporations can just bribe I mean lobby the government for permission to do bad things. There's not really an incentive for Crown corporations to do that.
A Crown corp is not there to make ever-increasing amounts of money, they're there to provide a service. No amount of deployed regulation on a for-profit, privately-owned corporation can change its tendency to optimize for the former.
Victory aircraft was a WW2 wartime aircraft manufacturer, not sure how that is relevant for anything. Wartime economics is very different from peacetime economics.
Orion Bus Industries is and was always a private company. It was owner by a government entity for an extremely short period.
Canadian Vickers is a private company.
Canadair was a private company, then nationalized for a decade. Crown didn't do a good job leading this company so they sold it a decade later. This just solidifies my point, they can't run industries efficiently.
> There's not really an incentive for Crown corporations to do that. They're not there to make ever-increasing amounts of money, they're there to provide a service.
Right, they can work in service sectors where you provide a service to people. They can't do good work in an industry sector where the job is to produce goods. Government agencies are great at managing simple sectors, but they couldn't take over the entire private sector. If they could then they would already have done that in many areas of the world and those would thrive. But anyone who tried quickly reversed it as it didn't work out.
"Evidence"? You said there aren't any industrial Crown corporations. In fact, you said that
>>>Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though
and
>>Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would, so using them as an example doesn't work.
But I listed a whole bunch of former industrial Crown corporations. Just because you don't like the idea that your baseless assertions were proven wrong by the facts doesn't detract from their facticity.
Canadian Vickers isn't a private company, they don't exist. When they did exist, they were heavily subsidized by the government and then nationalised into Canadair, which then privatized after the war and got thrown around as a subsidiary of various aerospace corps until '76 when the government bought it from General Dynamics. Then it actually did quite well until the Challenger business jet, then the Mulroney government -- one of those right-wing, fast-buck governments I mentioned earlier -- sold it in '86. And that's a great example, because that's just a straight-up loss. If a private company makes a crazily-bad investment, it's going to go under and get bought for pennies on the dollar by another private company. A Crown corporation, theoretically, can take less "sensible" business risks without that fear, because of government support. Unless the government decides it's not worth it and sells it for pennies on the dollar by another private company.
>Crown didn't do a good job leading this company so they sold it a decade later. This just solidifies my point, they can't run industries efficiently.
The "Crown" doesn't "lead" a Crown corporation. They don't make business decisions for them, they just provide a mandate (in this case, "design aircraft in Canada"), a financial backstop, and, yes, allow much more efficient internal meddling than normal regulatory schemes if need be.
To be honest, I don't think you really know what you're talking about. Your assertions are mostly false, and the suggestion that my argument is leading up to the idea that "government agencies" could "take over the entire private sector" is absolutely bonkers. Again, I suggest you go read up on what, exactly, a Crown corporation is and does. You're clearly under a number of incredible misapprehensions.
Incorrect.
> But they aren't which is the point. Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did.
See: SaskTel[1], SaskPower[2], SaskEnergy[3], Saskatchewan Government Insurance[4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaskTel
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaskPower
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaskEnergy
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatchewan_Government_Insura...
Ok, big ask, I know. How about this - they stop gutting the government to a point where any sort of reasonable regulation and oversight is essentially absent. Let's be honest for once about what "small government" stands for.
But what I'm sure you are aware of this line of thinking. What is the argument against it?
Probably because, as Jeff Hammerbacher said, "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
Oh absolutely, it's very clear HN hates that. Redditification is an ever-present threat, as I learned when I turned on showdead and finally saw, in almost every comment section, the root-level graveyards of "Very cool!" etc.
But that's an entirely different memeplex. HN hates that, but it also hates the idea that there's enormous monetary incentive to ignore existential problems caused by modern capitalism. One of the ways that displeasure might be shown is whataboutism regarding genuine if unhelpful "histrionics".
The same point could have been made without that garbage, and would have been better for it.
I've discussed this with libertarians and the best argument I've heard is that the incentive to manage negative externalities comes from private ownership. If the factory down the road is polluting the river that runs by your house, you sue them.
That is the argument against it. If you had elected good officials they would have created regulations against this already. Fact is that we can't elect good officials in the current system. Either it is because people would rather have more goods instead of caring about nature, or the system is corrupt and politicians use their power to enrich themselves rather than doing what people wants. Either case those politicians wont be fixing the problems you care about.
Sure, then we could elect politicians that are bad in different ways, but then this becomes a discussion against socialism, which is not what I'm intending here. I'm only talking about socialism hypothetically. My point is that we can't ignore capitalism's shortcomings. We have to understand what having profit as a main motivator leads to, so we can deal with it.
You are diagnosing the symptom and not the cause. Politicians selling their power to the highest bidder is a symptom of politicians being corrupt and using their power to enrich themselves. Removing the private sector would give these corrupt cronies a lot more power to enrich themselves, that woudln't solve anything at all. Instead of having people with money and people with military power, you now have the same people having both power over industry and power over military, do you really think these people would now start caring about the environment over how much those factories are producing? No, these politicians still enrich themselves, they run these factories to make themselves as wealthy as possible and now there isn't even a government to stop them since they are the government.
Modern capitalism is based on the separation between capital and state. We call it corruption when capital is used to buy political power, or when political power is used to buy capital power. Communism is the merging of capital power and political power and giving this to the same ruling class, it is the ultimate form of what we in the west calls corruption.
And empirically, the bottom 70% of the US population on the wealth scale has absolutely zero influence on public policy. The policies of the US overwhelmingly align with the interests of US corporations. I'd contend they'd be much less dominating otherwise.
No. The corruption is one of many symptoms of the problem, which is the fact that the electoral system is poorly designed for responsiveness and accountability, since it is structured so as to reinforce duopoly which incentivizes lesser-of-two-weasels voting.
Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes. Mao decreed increased efforts to multiply grain yields and bring industry to the countryside. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting "surpluses" that in fact did not exist and leaving farmers to starve. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. The Great Leap resulted in tens of millions of deaths, with estimates ranging between 15 and 55 million deaths, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest famine in human history.
The Four Pests campaign (Chinese: 除四害; pinyin: Chú Sì Hài), was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward in China from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The extermination of sparrows is also known as smash sparrows campaign (Chinese: 打麻雀运动; pinyin: Dǎ Máquè Yùndòng) or eliminate sparrows campaign (Chinese: 消灭麻雀运动; pinyin: Xiāomiè Máquè Yùndòng), which resulted in severe ecological imbalance, being one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine. In 1960, Mao Zedong ended the campaign against sparrows and redirected the fourth focus to bed bugs.
I find it bafflingly common to encounter the conflation of authoritarianism with collectivism.
Do you know any collectivist society above 1 million people that was not authoritarian?
Even China learned from the mistakes of collectivist ideas and moved towards socialist market economy which lead to the greatest uplifting of people from the extreme poverty in the whole history of human species.