Companies that lease vehicles for fuel to be transported are incredibly important. So are their drivers. So are cleaners in hopsitals. So are cell phone tower operators. So are shipping companies. So are computer monitor manufacturers.
Do we nationalise everything?
The natural monopolies of power generation, water, sewage, public transport, justice, prisons, defence, medical care, etc - why not? Certainly it seems that they were doing a better job when public anywhere they've been privatised.
The main reasons to nationalise are:
- there's no/not much innovation to do; it's just about running at low cost with a standard service (e.g. sewage)
- the incentives are too misaligned to privatise (e.g. prisons; defense)
- politicians can win votes by spending money on it, so it will be worse as a meddled-with private system than a nationalised system (e.g. healthcare)
- there is an actual natural/positive monopoly (e.g. power transmission)
None of that means that in this case a middleman power retailer should nationalise. If there's an actual reason, that's fine. But saying "some things are better national (or at least better than private with a lot of government interference)" doesn't mean that it applies here.
Also public ownership doesn't mean the enterprise can't be self funding or even profitable. E.g. my city's electrical plants and distribution are run by municipally owned company that pays dividends of the profit to the city.
You seem to be using examples I'd also cite as non-terrible reasons for a state/municipality to run something. I.e. things that are mature technologically, or at least we're willing to pause innovation and just stick with what we have, and just need an ultimately simple single product or service to be done efficiently.
However, if you got the municipality to run the companies (one of which succeeded, for each machine in question) that risked a lot to develop the necessary machinery to build those plants, I think you'd have seen a very different outcome.
I can also give a counterexample, if we're into anecdotes: Eskom, the South African state-owned energy company, is running South Africa into the ground with now daily scheduled blackouts, that have been going on for years. The government didn't let Eskom (back when it was private) to build enough power plants, and with South Africa's growing population, they don't have enough plants to keep online at once to serve their grid. This has been going on for 10+ years, but has really been hitting in the last 5. It doesn't matter to politicians, because they can afford generators in their houses and private healthcare. And there are no shareholders to care, because it's a state monopoly.
There can be bad governance in the private sector and in the public sector. The difference is the blast radius is far larger when it's the public sector, as the state has far more capacity to do damage than an individual company does. And if a company gets even 1% as much capacity as the state to do damage, we call it "rent seeking" or "monopoly".
The truth is that their needs to be a balance.
All political opinions are wrong and harmful, as a fact of human linings on complex systems with enormous numbers of unknowable factors.
So we should instead consider complex systems. A complex system needs to have capacity to change, and contain variation within itself. If it is too chaotic, it will dissipate; if it is too stable, its effectiveness will plummet when the environment changes.
This demonstrates why communists and libertarians are both full of shit.
It suggests that a nation should have a mix of private and nationalised industry.
When new categories emerge, besides private and national, then nations should have some of that in the mix, too: in order to maintain internal heterogeneity, to provide a reserve of dynamism.
Finland's national and third sector (e.g. co-operatives) were (and still are) plundered quite a bit too, although of course nothing like ex-socialist countries.
There indeed needs to be a mix. The "mix" in mixed economy wasn't just about gov ownership vs capitalist ownership. It was also about co-ops, unions, worker ownership and non-profits.
Those all sound like things that would exist just fine in a capitalist system. It's just "free agreement between individuals to create organisations that can only compete based on rules set out by the government". They can all exist in that framework, and do.
Co-ops are just a type of ownership structure, like any other. Unions are a condition of employment agreement between employee and employer. Non-profits, like charities, are just a type of governance and taxation arrangement that exists fine in that system.
That said, co-ops are still huge in Finnish retail, banking and insurance (to great annoyance of the right). But they nowadays they tend to even sort of hide being a co-op and economy is mostly discussed as for-profits vs gov ownership. Other than for-profit doesn't really sit that nicely in the neoliberal ideology.
Co-ops are quite a different form of ownership from private corporations and bring about different kinds of economic organization that is e.g. more robust against offshoring, speculation and asset-stripping.
The type of ownership, i.e. what is enforced by the law, and violence in the extreme case, is the crux of any economic system. E.g. socialism vs capitalism difference is essentially what kind of ownership is enforced by law/state/community.
Can you explain how that is? My conception is if I set up a company today that has as part of its rules the idea that when any employee joins/leaves shares (or virtual shares) with voting rights are rebalanced, do I not have the basic elements of a co-op? Aren't co-ops still for-profit?
The co-op can run a profit, but typically the charter is to provide some service (e.g. retail or banking) for the members (and typically for non-members too). Profits can be shared as dividends for the shares, but this is quite rare nowadays, and more often used to invest in new stores etc and/or lower prices. It typically doesn't make much sense for the members that e.g. your grocery store is moved to Bangladesh, so that quite rare.
Worker co-ops are a bit different. You have to work at the co-op to have a share, and the payout is typically the salary. But crucially an investor can't just buy shares and just move the production to Congo and kick out the employees etc what for-profits do all the time if it gives the owners a higher profit.
Sigh. No they don't. Most for-profits are small businesses. It's really hard to break through the fog of "I'm all right Jack"-inspired attitudes to businesses.
But yes, agree - joining gives you one voting right; the shares can't be bought and sold. That's what I mean about that being a perfectly normal thing to have under capitalism. As long as it's a legal and free agreement between employee and employer, capitalism is very happy with it.
Yes, the legal framework of liberalism typically does allow for a wide variety of contractual associations. Some are more conducive to capitalism, i.e. extracting profits from work (typically by others) by the sole virtue of ownership.
Working for yourself is also capitalism. All of the contractual associations we've mentioned work well in capitalism. Your "extracting profits from work" characterization is misplaced. A self-employed plumber extracts profits from work in a sense, but it's a biased way to put it. Everyone who starts a business and loses money isn't extracting profits.
A more neutral way is "people work and pay based on voluntary agreements, under law". Which would include the co-op arrangement we've mentioned.