Why are we letting private companies own public infrastructure?
Whereas the better thing to do is have the government own the physical plant (utility poles and conduits etc.) and then hire private contractors -- large numbers of small entities, not small numbers of large entities -- to do all the actual work of operating and maintaining it.
Make each contracted role simple and fungible so that none of them are too big to fail and they're all in competition with each other.
You don't want a public monopoly. You don't want a private monopoly. But who says those are the only options?
Generation is pretty low intensity from an employee standpoint. I know you’re brainwashed to hate unions, but they have little to do with it.
The small operators are mostly vertically integrated in a small area, so they can deal with the capital buildouts and aren’t subject to as many swings in commodity cost. They often even own the utility rights of way, generating additional income and avoiding property taxes.
It takes alot of union workers and pensions to make up for the pay of one private CEO.
It's the transmission and distribution which are the "natural monopoly" -- the government should own the utility poles -- but that's also a thing where there is a non-trivial amount of labor involved for tree trimming and storm damage etc.
The public utility employs linemen. They don’t contract out operations.
Knowing this, there is probably a way to make things better…
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
It has been said that public operation of infrastructure is the worst form of operation of infrastructure except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
It is hardly a maxim that public operation of infrastructure is incompetent, and I would argue that "often" is not the right word.
That means that when you're making comparisons to either the past or other countries now, you want to compare cohort-matched groups. If your area has a bunch of poor brown kids used to leave school for jobs in the 8th grade and are now going all the way through graduation, that looks like the schools are getting worse even though the school's educational practices haven't changed and the problem you really want to solve is poverty or social mobility. This is especially true for international comparisons if you have things like tests where the population in one country going in is highly selective but broader somewhere else – everyone's acting in good faith but you still have distortion due to sampling bias.
The situation is similar: if a kid with dyslexia, ADHD, etc. in the 1960s would have been pushed out but now they're included, if you're looking at the global average it looks like test scores have gone down but if you look at subgroups of the student population you'll see that the top performers are still doing well and what changed was that another group was added.
At my son's school and some of the schools I went to as a kid, the subgroup breakdowns on stats are really stark: the kids from stable, middle-class or better groups do fine but the children of immigrants who are still working on their English skills struggle – and the lesson I've drawn is that we should have more support available for them outside of regular classes because it's such a powerful amplifier for everything else.
The point I was making is that public or private management is not a determining factor in the competence of infrastructure management. That is the point from the GP that I was rebutting.
Kindly define "not well" compared to privately owned infrastructure.
Singapore MRT (Mass Rapid Transit)
Fully government-owned and operated through Temasek holdings. Known worldwide for punctuality, efficiency, affordability, and cleanliness. Consistently outperforms privatized systems like the UK railways in reliability and customer satisfaction.
Paris Métro & RATP (France)
State-owned, with fares subsidized for accessibility. High ridership, integration with buses and trams, and affordable tickets outperform privatized systems in cost to the public.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (USA)
The largest municipal utility in the U.S. Provides electricity and water at lower rates than surrounding private utilities (like PG&E), and is often more reliable due to public accountability.
Norway’s Energy Sector (Statkraft, state-owned hydropower)
Provides cheap, renewable electricity. Profits flow back to the public treasury instead of shareholders. Norway has among the lowest power costs in Europe.
Germany’s Municipal Waterworks
Almost all publicly owned; provide safe, affordable, and reliable water with strong reinvestment in infrastructure, outperforming privatized systems in the UK (like Thames Water, plagued by leaks and debt).
Singapore Changi Airport
State-owned and consistently ranked as the world’s best airport. Clean, efficient, profitable, and reinvests in expansion. Private-run airports often prioritize concessions and profits over passenger experience.
Dallas–Fort Worth Airport (USA)
A publicly owned joint venture between Dallas and Fort Worth. It is one of the busiest and best-managed airports in the world, consistently profitable and reinvesting in facilities.
ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation)
While not "utilities" per se, ISRO’s infrastructure (satellite launch facilities, tracking networks) is a prime example of state-run infrastructure outperforming expectations at extraordinary low cost.
Has launched satellites at a fraction of the budget of Western private and public space agencies, and even provides launch services internationally.
There are many more such examples. Public ownership tends to work best in natural monopolies (water, power grids, rail systems, airports, healthcare infrastructure), where competition doesn’t function well and the priority is universal service rather than profit.
But, more simply - no one is suggesting all public ownership is bad, or all private is good. There are situations where governments have just decided they aren't doing a good job running something (all things considered) and that the amount of money they'd get for selling it is a better option all things considered.
The national railway in the Netherlands is a great example of this. They've privatized but with gov't subsidies, yet there's less trains, less people getting moved by the remaining trains, ticket prices skyrocketing YoY, worse service, rail workers getting shafted and basically being forced to go on strike in order to improve conditions. They're (NS) a monopoly too and handle something like 95% of all rail traffic within the Netherlands.
I believe the UK is going through a similar issue, where their railways are now privatized and in turn it's lead to increasingly worse service despite there being plenty of competition in the market in the form of many rail companies.
This lolbert fantasy of the "free" market being good for literally everything, including critical public infrastructure is a complete farce.
I'm not in favor of privatizing a natural monopoly like railway infrastructure, but in the case of NS I'm not sure privatization would be worse than what we have now: "market friendly" salaries for management, and yearly losses go to the tax payer.
The basic problem with the way you are thinking about it with respect to the national railway is that you don't seem to include cost to the government (ie, the people) to run it. Much infrastructure might appear to be "well run" by the government until you see the massive hole in the their budget. Sometimes the service has to get worse. When the government decides some piece of infrastructure must "pay for itself", they often sell it or hand over management to a private entity as a way to shift blame.
There are many private companies/PE firms etc who are competitively bidding to own these assets. It's not some license to print money, they are low return low risk assets.
They do have better PR though.
Your LLM mentions two examples of failed public airports. Counterpoint: ATL is the worlds busiest airport by a few different metrics, and it is publicly owned and managed. So are most (maybe all?) of the rest of the worlds busiest airports. What does that mean?
By analogy: just because a person doubles down on a misinformed take using an LLM's output as evidence, that everything they think and know is false and misinformed by LLMs is not a foregone conclusion. It would be silly for me to think that someone that uses bad arguments once, or the same bad argument repeatedly in an online thread, is always going to be wrong.
You could do us all a service if you used your chatGPT account to learn about the basics of formal logic and sound arguments instead of spamming this thread with the same response from a machine that you asked for a biased output.
ATL was the airport involved in corruption no?
Use formal logic to show a single thing I've said in this thread is illogical. You either cannot read, or don't understand formal logic.