Comment by usrbinbash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by usrbinbash | Hacker News Reader

All privatizations of public infrastructur and services are failures, simply due to the discrepancy between the interests:

The public wants: Cheap, reliable, quality services.

A corporation wants: Maximized Revenue.

The two inevitably clash. No matter what business, no matter what country. Don't believe me? Go and find a single instance of a service that used to be provided completely by the government, that got BETTER FOR USERS (that is: The Public, not investors) after being privatized. I'll wait.

Public utilitis HAVE TO be run by the public, meaning the government. In pretty much every instance where this isn't the case, the provided service is more expensive, and/or less effective for the people.

And that's why I am sick and tired of the old trope "bUt pRivAtE sEcToR mOrE effIciEnt!" Sure. That would be the same private sector that caused almost every non-war related major economic crisis, is it not? I think the "efficiency argument" is already a moot point.

Why would public ownership deliver those benefits? Walmart is delivering cheap, quality and reliable service in retail. Soviet stores we not better than American ones.

Let's see: Is Walmart a utility provider, or a retailer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart

> Walmart Inc.[a] is an American multinational retail corporation

>Don't believe me? Go and find a single instance of a service that used to be provided completely by the government, that got BETTER FOR USERS (that is: The Public, not investors) after being privatized. I'll wait.

You won't have to wait long: flying. Shocked? You shouldn't be. In the 70s, you'd have to pay thousands of dollars to fly across the country. Now you can get a flight between NYC and London for $200.

Time to retract your entire little rant.

> Time to retract your entire little rant.

https://techrights.org/n/2025/08/22/Enshittification_of_Airp...

You were saying?

Did you read the source you posted?

It basically provides a bunch of graphs that confirms that flying is safer than ever, even as more people than ever fly at cheaper fares than ever. Embedded within the actual data is an unsubstantiated rant about enshittification and the danger of flying (despite the evidence they chose indicating the opposite), and a tangent about github.

Air travel wasn't provided by the government before deregulation. The airlines have always been private companies. They were heavily regulated and run as public utility. Deregulation increased competition but nothing was privatized, the CAB was eliminated.

Air travel is also not privatized these days. The airports are nearly all owned by government entities.

Competition dynamics for air traffic are different. Railway infrastructure can only support a very limited number of competing companies before you run out of capacity, and especially on classic mixed traffic routes it is very easy to run out of capacity. Once that happens, rail operators have to start competing for paths instead of directly for passenger, which can definitely lead to misalignment of incentives.

On top of that, there's the problem that it's physically impossible to run competing services at exactly the same time. This means that for customers with schedule constraints (i.e. you need to arrive somewhere specific by a certain time at latest), competition becomes much less effective, because you're no longer able to freely choose among the competing operators, but are instead forced to simply take the train that arrives at the right time.

A similar thing is for journeys that involve changes of trains – it's physically impossible to have attractive connections (i.e. without hanging around the station for ages) between more than one or at most (if that) two operators per route, because trains running along the same line always have to be separated by at least two or three minutes.

With air traffic it's different. While airport and air space capacity isn't quite unlimited, it's still not as limited in the way a mixed traffic railway is. Plus a much higher proportion of air traffic is holiday traffic and other long-distance journeys where even a few flights per day would be considered frequent service, so competition is much less limited by that fact.

RegioJet is a much better and cheaper service than the state-operated rail service.

This is only "true" because anything run efficiently by the private sector is so demonstrably better than any communist-fantasy alternative that no one bothers arguing any more.

Should Tesco be run by the government? I use Tesco more than I take trains.

May be of note also that the best train in London (the Elizabeth line) is run by a tendering process

> May be of note also that the best train in London (the Elizabeth line) is run by a tendering process

But that tendering is just internal between the state and the operator – fares and service levels on the other hand are set by TfL (and probably also the DfT to some extent, especially on the GEML and GWML sections).

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