I’m just curious for the new or existing people? Lemmy.ml has taken a hard turn to the right since the reddit exodus. There’s been a lot of pro-imperialist propaganda being posted on world news, and a lot less diversity of opinion. It feels more neoliberal and neo-con to me.
Does anyone want to share what their political leanings are?
I’ll start; I’m anti-imperialist pro-state regulated capitalism. I believe we should have usage based taxes (toll roads, carbon tax) and luxury taxes, and I disagree with wealth taxes for people with less than $250 million. The state should spend more money on consumer protection in all industries (environment, health, finance, etc.) I believe in multipolarity vs. US hegemony.
Social Democrat.
Lots of anti monopoly pro consumer regulations. But freedom to have private enterprise. High income and corporate tax. Free healthcare & education. Even rare diseases and university. Corporations can only lease and never own land. Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas.
I get the reasons for most of your points from a perspective of moderate “leftist”. But why “Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas”?
You seem to somewhat believe in private enterprise, so why prevent it from providing those services at competitive cost/quality?
Markets work best when there are a number of firms that must compete with one another. For some goods and services, that level of competition is impractical or impossible because of the high amount of infrastructure required. It wouldn’t make much sense for each company to build a completely separate set of water purification and distribution systems—it would be very expensive and take up a lot of space.
In many areas of the US we have a bizarre setup where there is a government enforced monopoly where a single company can reap all of the profits. This often leads to poor service because the company has very little incentive to provide value to its customers. Government owned services can be flawed as well but at least they are directly accountable to their citizens instead of a board or shareholders.
As I said in reply to other person, in my country there’s private businesses providing those services for cheaper price than the government alternative. Infrastructure for the most part is provided by 3rd party.
Also I keep hearing this talk about “government accountability”, but what mechanism of accountability does government have? Private firms at least can go out of business or sued. Government in worst case will just pay you some of its “tax money”
I’m not the person you replied to and this isn’t well thought out. Just trying to think this through myself.
How would something like an electric company offer competitive cost or quality? There’d have to be at least two options serving an area in order for there to be some kind of competition. So do each of those companies build their own infrastructure, power stations, power lines, etc? So a neighborhood would have two sets of power lines? That seems wasteful and would get pretty ugly as more competitors came in. So maybe instead the government builds the infrastructure and the competing companies lease the usage of the infrastructure. But then what are the companies going to offer as a competitive advantage? I don’t know. They need to make some kind of profit in order to justify their existence. And they have to pay for the usage of the infrastructure. And they don’t want to lose money. And let’s assume the government doesn’t pick favorites and charges each of them the same. So we end up paying them more than what it costs them to lease the infrastructure. So why can’t we just cut them out, i.e. cut out the middle man, and pay the government directly. I guess this all just assumes that there’s nothing extra an electric company can offer on top of the electricity being supplied.
What you’re describing kind of exists here in Portugal, the transmission lines are owned by the state but the actual electricity generation / internet service / whatever is left to private companies. So you can go onto a web portal and change your supplier to a different electric company or ISP or whatever, without needing to physically do anything at your house. Just maybe exchange a router or something like that. But no builders coming out to the property or whatever. And where I live near Lisbon there are like 8-10 available suppliers.
In my country private companies provide their service much cheaper than government alternative. And, yes they use shared infrastructure.
