Why Is Youth So Left-Wing?

[fazzoletti]

Again, I would like you to aswer to what I write. You can either admit Im right, or you can prove me wrong. Or or course you could turn the subject away from it's focus and ask me about my feelings...

You mean about Thatcher? I did give you my opinion on that subject didn't I?

 

[IglooDame]

Well I can see that my allegations about the British railway system challenged an article of faith for some of you libertarians.
I'd better make sure what I say on this subject is watertight otherwise I've no chance of convincing the sceptics

What happened was this: in the mid 1990s the British railways were in public ownership, and a single public body called 'British Rail' ran the whole show. Anyway in the mid 1990s a decision was taken to privatise the company. In order to introduce competition the single body was broken up into several bodies. One single body, called 'Railtrack' was responsible for track, station, signals, and other railway infrastructure, and there were also a number of Train Operating Companies ('TOCs') set up that would run trains on the tracks maintained by railtrack. The idea of a separate company to run the track AFAIK was designed to avoid some of the problems that happened when the phone system was privatised, and a phone service provider had to use the infrastructure actually owned by a rival in order to provide services.

After privatisation, as was the fad in the mid-late 90s with senior managements (and still is to some extent) Railtrack began to contract out its core work, the maintenance of track and infrastructure as well as the building of new track. Costs soared, much higher than when this was done in house by British Rail. After lurching from one financial disaster to the next Railtrack was finally wound up and replaced by a public sector body a couple of years ago (although the TOCs remain in private hands). One of the first things the new public sector body 'Network Rail' did was to bring maintenance or track back in house to avoid the spiralling costs and other problems associated with contracting it out. Thus the public sector is now able to achieve the requisite maintenance more cheaply and efficiently than the private sector was.

I don't have a link to a narrative that explains this as I've laid it out, but here's links for each individual step of the argument:

On the initial fragmentation of the rail industry at privatisation
this link from an all party parliamentary select committee The relevant section (that provides a bit of background on the privatisation) is the one titled 'Fragmentation of the Rail industry'

On the decision to bring maintenance back in house because of spiralling costs (shortly after railtrack had been wound up and network rail set up to replace it click here and here

And as a post script here's some of the problems that passengers are still facing thanks to the still fragmented nature of the industry
train companies lie to passengers

Also this website has some more background articles on these subjects

So far I only talked about maintenance in this post but its true of new projects too.

A big project of the post privatisation was to be the West Coast mainline, designed to shorten journey times up the West coast from London to the major cities in Scotland. Under privatisation the projected cost of this project (projected by the private company railtrack) was £13 billion, the public sector Network Rail has been able to identify efficiencies in the projected plans and cut the costs substantially link here

Whew! That post took a long time to write and research. I sure hope my boss didn't realise what I was doing

Thanks again for the information. I've looked through it, and the "why" that I was looking for seems to be that when the UK privatized the railway, they parceled it out not regionally or according to markets, but according to department (track maintenance, rolling stock, customer service, etc) and then chopped up the departments. I wonder if the problem was not that privatizing it lowered efficiency, but that splitting it up in the way they did lowered the efficiency. To use a somewhat similar example in the US, AT&T ("Ma Bell") was declared a monopoly some time back and was ordered to split up into regional ("Baby Bell") companies. The companies had to figure out how to work together on long-distance calls, collectively used facilities and infrastructure, and so on, and they did and now in many cases compete with each and with the original AT&T nationally. You still get a dial-tone when you pick up the phone, and while telephone companies still aren't the most customer-friendly organizations on the planet, the breakup is seen to have been a success by all measures.
Also, your links do not address two fairly big questions - what was the regulatory load on the newly-privatized resources, and what kind of subsidies was the government giving the railway prior to privatization and after de-privatization?
Some people blame California's electricity crisis of a few years ago on deregulation. However, they only deregulated halfway, and when you are forced to sell to customers at a certain price but have to pay according to market forces on the production side, you've set yourself up for that crisis.

 

[insurgent]

I thought this earlier quote:
meant that you were subscribing to (2) above, but from what you now say I must've misunderstood because it seems your alligning yourself with (1).

Okay, I can see why. (2) is right because (1) is correct. So (2) is redundant.

However, the sentence beginning 'nobody knows' I have to disagree. It seems to me libertarians take it as an article of faith rather than something that might or might not be true. For example smokers in some parts of the 20th century didn't used to know the damage that smoking was doing to their own long term health, even though some scientists etc did. This shows the people didn't know the most on the issue (they just didn't have the facts available). But it won't be enough to convince libertarians, I'm sure of that

Well, did the government know it? If it did, then it should have let the public know. If not, then I fail to see how it could've helped. All the public needs is information, and wether this comes from research or empirical knowledge is irrelevant.

Aren't there vast numbers of uninsured people in places where health insurance is voluntary? I don't know enough about the US system to say for sure, but aren't there lots of uninsured there?

I'd like to see some statistics too, but I don't have time to look for them right now. I will later, if you don't beat me to it. I suppose there could be a high number of uninsured, but AFAIK, these still get treatment, they're just billed afterwards, which is very expensive as it comes all at once. On the other hand, I've been told that a large number of people are insured through their employers. So people who don't have a health insurance by themselves are often insured by their employers.
But to me, all such a statistic could indicate is how far my logic is from ordinary Americans'. I'd definitely pay to have health insurance, but I feel obliged to respect if others don't because they need the money or whatever.

Sometimes people make bad decisions, and sometimes vunerable people make the worse decisions. Sometimes people don't understand the significance of the consequence of the decisions they make (in fact its impossible to know since the future is uncertain in our perception). So the Government can act as a safety net.

Well, my classic response would be that neither does government know that, and then we might as well let people decide for themselves.
The fact is that I consider the cost of money and the toll it takes on human freedom too high to have such a safety net. I can only guess that your priorities must be fundamentally different.
I just think it's such a shame that everybody has to pay to erect a safety net that could be erected voluntarily by those who want it.

I can't think how to phrase it exactly, but its something along the lines of the government should intervene where individuals have a tendency to systematically misjudge what contributes to their well being. That's not it exactly though, but something similar to that.

I guess that's another difference between you and me. I really don't think that government can evaluate and properly decide what is important for an individual. Decisions that concern the life of the individual are most important to the individual himself and thus he is the only one to make a proper decision, weighing all the factors that matter to him. Let's use your example:

Health insurance is a great example, because if 10% of people get ill, individuals might think they are certain to be in the 90%, whereas the cost of the insurance is far far far less than the downside of being in the 10% without the health insurance

Yes, you and I think so, but that's not what I want to point out. An individual making this calculation can have other concerns as well. Perhaps he desperately need the money to buy something important to him - it doesn't matter what, let's just say it's a house. He thinks about the chance, 10%, and decides that if he ever needs hospital treatment, he will have to pay a whole lot more at once instead of putting the money aside over a long period of time. So that's what he could do. Put money aside - some people do that instead of insuring (because they think it pays off because of the profit-making nature of private insurance companies). He could also decide to invest in the house, knowing very well that he might have to sell it all again to afford treatment because of his decision.
The fact is that the decision is his, and he is the only one who actually knows which solution is best for him in particular. The only possible downside for him is that he has to bear the consequences of his own choices. And I know what that implies, but that doesn't make the freedom it gives less desirable.
With freedom comes responsibility, and people are well capable of taking that.

 

[Evertonian]

I guess that's another difference between you and me. I really don't think that government can evaluate and properly decide what is important for an individual. Decisions that concern the life of the individual are most important to the individual himself and thus he is the only one to make a proper decision, weighing all the factors that matter to him.

@insurgent
Thanks for another well written and thought provoking response

I think we do have a philosphical difference on this point, rather than something where we strip away what's being said and find a common position. I doubt what I'll say will convince you to reject libertarianism, although I also doubt that what you'll say will convince me that collective/government isn't justified sometimes to take certain decisions out of the hands of the individual, or to have a process for deciding collective decisions. Nonetheless the discussion is interesting.

What I want to ask say is this: if a person is really in all circumstances the VERY BEST judge, in the real world, of all the decisions in their life then why do people regret some decisions they make?

Also, I want to tell you about a specific piece of interfering government legislation in Britian recently (unfortunately i don't have figures but please believe me).

A common way for people to kill themselves in Britain was to overdose on a common over the counter drug called paracetomol (not sure if its called the same elsewhere) that is used to tread symptoms of colds, flu etc. These were typically sold in packets of 48 or 24. 40 of these would certainly be enough to kill somebody. Customers often bought 48 perceiving them to be better value.

Anyway the Government passed the law saying no more than 16 of these pills could be sold in a single transaction. So consumers started buying just 16 of them. This act has had a material impact on the overall number of suicides (not just their method). If the perosn concerned really knew that suicide was the best option, wouldn't they find some other way to kill themselves? Or isn't it the case that human beings very often have ambivalent feelings about things, and aren't really sure that the course they decide on is the best one, and so in some cases need protecting from very bad courses?

 

[newfangle]

@Evertonian:

I don't want to draw you away from your conversations with Igloo and Insurgent, but I'd like to post a quick comment about the Britist Railway example.

The most common problem with any privitization is that it is not truly allowing things to become privitized. In the instance of the British rails, the government still had a huge role in the rails, i.e., delcaring where a specific company could do business. Needless to say, such behaviour only breeds problems.

The worst cases of coersive monopolies in history took place 100 years ago in America, and they involved the rails. The US government decided to assigned a region to each rail company to ensure that competition was "fair." Because each company had a virtual monopoly in their region, the tracks fell into disrepair and prices skyrocketed. All this because of government intervention.

Same story for the UK. When a government attempts to privitize, they are usually fooling themselves because they don't have the gall to do it.

 

[fazzoletti]

As a hard-nosed libertarian, I dare state that privatizing railroad systems is not desirable. The reason is that railroad transport is a so-called "natural monopoly". You can't have two companies competing but using the same rails (well, you could possibly if you assign certain parts of the day to each of em, but thats not very practical). Neither can you have two or more companies lay rails next to one another (from a cost perspective). So that why in this sector, privatizing companies is not a good idea. Same thing applies to the area of defence (of your country) or the police.

 

[newfangle]

(well, you could possibly if you assign certain parts of the day to each of em, but thats not very practical).

As I stated, its things like this that only result in the destruction of privitization.

 

[Archer 007]

You can have multiple companies using the same rails. We do in all the time here in the US.

There are no such things as natural monopolies.

 

[fazzoletti]

How does that work then? Do you split the day in several parts?

 

[Akka]

The market rewards information, the people who have information have more power. Call it mob rule if you will, but fact is it will make the best decisions because it has more information.
And if all society is part of the mob making the rule, then certainly it's a trial by society, even if an unfair one. But individual rights exist exactly for that case.

If it's unfair, then it's worth nothing as a trial.
And it's not only information, it's also the weight you have in the market.

Economy is no more then the people who compose it, how can it be?
The rules of Economy are basically the rules that drive mankind, and the reason why nobody can fully understand all forces behind it is because nobody can know all individuals and the individual ends of everyone.

Economy is not people, it's a system that is based on statistics and of leverage. When some speculators can bring down a currency, affecting against their will the lives of some tens of millions other people, it clearly shows that the mechanism of this system are much more in the hands of some big fishs than of the overwhelming majority of people.

If you want the names of the selective few that actually have more power over humanity, you should think of Bush, Putin, Blair, Chirac, Sharon and Zemin. They can wipe us all and destroy our planet, not Bill Gates.

That is ludicrious.
These guys have the POTENTIAL to have this kind of power. They have the POTENTIAL to destroy the market, or the planet. But they don't DO it. While the big corporation DO exercises their influence and power on a daily basis. It's like saying the police has a stronger influence than your parent in your upbringing, because it has the power to put you in jail and not your parents - yes, it can, but the reality is that you interact much more often with your parents.

There's nothing magical about the Market, it's just that, a market where you can buy and sell stuff and speculate about the future price of stuff.
The market WILL rewar accordingly to information AND according to the ability of each worker to satisfy the consumers. Unltimately it gives power to the consumers, ie all individuals.

Wishful thinking.
Consumers can't practically vote with what they buy. That's nice theory, but it's about as realist as communism. To really "vote" with what they buy, each and every person would require an amount of information unrealist to achieve and handle. You need to know which company the brand you buy belongs to (a feat that is a full-time expert job), what these company do in child labor and environmental policies (a full-time job for many policemen) and know how they treat their employees. You also need to know the same for the concurrence, compare prices and quality.
And you need to get and process all these information in your spare time while doing your shopping.
That's simply impossible.

The reality is that the market is all but fair, and that the average consumer know about nothing about it, and make decision on extremely limited knowledge, which means that most of the theory about the market (which require full information of what is available and at which condition) is simply going through the window.

Government have a tremendous power of the economy, even if they shouldn't have. The richest man of Russia, the owner of the largest corporation of the country, is in jail. This is proof of the power of state over business.

Wow, there is a rich man in jail, and suddendly it means government has power over economy ?
Don't see the link. Someone in prison doesn't mean government have power over business, it means that government enforce the laws.

The CEOs of big corporations are accountable to 3 groups of people, and each one of those 3 can punish them hardly. They are the shareholders, the consumers of their products, and the government.
If the shareholders are unhappy about the way business is beign conducted, they get fired.
If consumers are unhappy with the products/service, they get fired/the corporation goes bankrupt.
If the government feels that they are breaking a law, they go to jail.
So they are accountable to a lot of people.

Of course they have to follow the law... Though, as big corporations spawn over many countries, it's quite easy to delocalize to benefit of the difference of laws (child labor ?).
And they are accountable only for results. Not for means. Which is precisely the problem. As long as money flows in, a corporation can be as abominable as it wishes, the shareholder will be happy. There is no checks and balance that are built into the market, to restrain a corporation from doing anything immoral.

The former president of Enron was arrested this week, IIRC, and he certianly qualifies as one of the "selective few" you talked about. So no, the market doesn't make anyone above the Law.

They are not above, but they certainly can find arrangement with it many times. Not always, hopefully, and eventually some do fall.

It's not based on "the law of the strongest", it simply rewards the ability to please consumers. We all consumers, and WE reward those who please us the most.

Wishful thinking, again. We reward the ones who are able to get out of the pack, and it usually involve crushing competition by whatever means is available, and simply being better known, even if the products are inferior/more expensive.

The Market is not a god, nor an organic entity. Simple Laws of Supply and Demand make it place resources in the most efficient manner, what no government can. It maximises the overall Economic Welfare, when free.

The market is a system, yes, not a god. And it's a system which doesn't exist in the Pure State that most of its followers would like. It's a system that has to do with human nature, which isn't rationnal, and still try to base itself on complete rationnality. As such, it's an imperfect system, that needs to be checked, tamed and controlled by entities which are actually accountable to society : governments.
(I'm, of course, speaking ONLY for democractic governments)

 

[insurgent]

You can have multiple companies using the same rails. We do in all the time here in the US.

Don't you also have multiple railroad systems for different competing railroad companies? And I know for a fact that there used to be a such system in Britain in the 19th Century (I remember watching something on Discovery Channel about two companies competing on the route London-Scotland...).

 

[insurgent]

There are no such things as natural monopolies.

Oh, and it's a little strange for me as a libertarian to have to point out that government is by most considered a natural monopoly. Of course, security and state functions could be run by competing free market companies, but you don't think so, do you now? So, of course there are natural monopolies.

 

[insurgent]

I think we do have a philosphical difference on this point, rather than something where we strip away what's being said and find a common position. I doubt what I'll say will convince you to reject libertarianism, although I also doubt that what you'll say will convince me that collective/government isn't justified sometimes to take certain decisions out of the hands of the individual, or to have a process for deciding collective decisions. Nonetheless the discussion is interesting.

Agreed.

What I want to ask say is this: if a person is really in all circumstances the VERY BEST judge, in the real world, of all the decisions in their life then why do people regret some decisions they make?

Because people can make mistakes. Why do people regret government decisions?
Now, no, humans are not infallible, but I'm not worried about that. People should take the individual responsibility with the individual freedom. They also have to take the consequences of their bad decisions.
Sure, they may not always be the best judge, but as a general rule they are, and indeed they are only ones who have a right to make the decisions in question.
That is: I can disagree with with my neighbour's decision to take a loan and be right, without having to force him to mend his errant ways. It simply isn't my choice, it's his.

Anyway the Government passed the law saying no more than 16 of these pills could be sold in a single transaction. So consumers started buying just 16 of them. This act has had a material impact on the overall number of suicides (not just their method). If the perosn concerned really knew that suicide was the best option, wouldn't they find some other way to kill themselves? Or isn't it the case that human beings very often have ambivalent feelings about things, and aren't really sure that the course they decide on is the best one, and so in some cases need protecting from very bad courses?

That's an interesting example, but I'm sure government coercion did not have to be employed to achieve this.
The trick is to leave the choice to people themselves and let free will and free enterprise do the work through voluntary cooperation (ie. trade).
Free will, free choice, and free enterprise, that's my motto.

 

[crystal]

This thread again proves that economic libertarians are usually very naive. They should get a sense of realism. Seriously, economies are run by people, and people make mistakes or may treat each other unfairly. Free market is no infallible god, contrary to what many people seem to think.

 

[Archer 007]

How does that work then? Do you split the day in several parts?

I have no idea. I dont know much about trains.

 

[newfangle]

This thread again proves that economic libertarians are usually very naive.

Take logic 101 to understand what a "proof" is. Kay?

They should get a sense of realism.

Believing in the only economic system built from man's nature is the only realistic view in economics.

Seriously, economies are run by people, and people make mistakes or may treat each other unfairly.

Something that is well-incorporated into its theory....

Free market is no infallible god, contrary to what many people seem to think.

I was not under the assumption that an economic system can take on deity-like quantities.





See how easy it is to make inane posts?

Next time you want to spatter blanket statements, at least try to defend them.

 

[Archer 007]

Oh, and it's a little strange for me as a libertarian to have to point out that government is by most considered a natural monopoly. Of course, security and state functions could be run by competing free market companies, but you don't think so, do you now? So, of course there are natural monopolies.

Security and such could be done by private companies.

 

[Archer 007]

Don't you also have multiple railroad systems for different competing railroad companies? And I know for a fact that there used to be a such system in Britain in the 19th Century (I remember watching something on Discovery Channel about two companies competing on the route London-Scotland...).

I dont quite know, but I dont think so.

 

[Akka]

Security and such could be done by private companies.

Yeeeeeeeeeeees of course
I can perfectly envision the quality and fairness of a privately-run police

Oh, and I suppose trials and the justice system would also be run by a private company ?

 

[crystal]

Believing in the only economic system built from man's nature is the only realistic view in economics.

Yes, that's why free market is sometimes unpractical.

Something that is well-incorporated into its theory....

No, the theory suggests that each individual should be able to do whatever they want based on their on self-interest and available information (if it doesn't contradict with the law of course). Unregulated free market doesn't work well in practise.

Next time you want to spatter blanket statements, at least try to defend them.

Err, my previous post was my first one in this thread? Anyway I prefer to keep my posts terse.