IglooDude said:
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.
newfangle said:
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.
IglooDude, newfangle
First, sorry for delay in replying
, and apologies to everyone else because the conversation has moved on a bit since these posts and I'm bringing it back.
Thanks to bigfatron for his excellent post which explained the overall experience of railway privatisation in Britain much better than mine.
The initial point I made in a different context of the debate was this:
Evertonian said:
I disagree with this. Sometimes the Government can be more efficient. Britain's railways were privatised in the 1990s, and under the privatised system it cost much much more in real terms to build 1 kilometre of new track, or maintenance work on 1 kilometre of old track.
I didn't comment on the overall efficiency of the system, because I knew that there could be (and indeed was) an argument made that its inefficiency was due to the regulatory regime. However, in the case of maintenance of track, and building new track these were a specific thing that was previously done (in house) by the government, then handed out to private companies (the maintenance companies competed with each other for the contracts to do the maintenance works on bits of track) then brought back in house in the public sector and was cheaper.
I do think that the private sector is sometimes more efficient, and I do think the public sector is sometimes more efficient.
I don't want this to sound offensive, it isn't meant to be, its just an observation. The libertarians think the private sector is always more efficient, and that if it appears not to be its clearly because of some government intervention or impediment to the market. It seems to me that this is held as an article of faith, rather than a proposition which could be conceivably put to the test empirically. Any empirical example that appears to contradict it will be explained away much as adherents to any faith explain away facts that appear to contradict it. It reminds me of, say, religious people, who believe what they believe as a matter of faith and dismiss or explain away any information that contradicts it.
IMHO social sciences are still in their infancy in cosmic terms, but a particlular (and old) conclusion of a half baked theory, based on a model containing demonstrably false assumptions is taken by many extremely intellegent and thoughtful people as a paradigm for how we should manage our economies.
So despite the fact that economics as a discipline is only a couple of centuries old, there's nothing more to be learned, we already know the ultimate answer, which is to leave it to the free market, despite the fact that a lot of people are unhappy with it. There's been tremendous progress made in the last 2 decades in understanding the sources of people's happiness and how the economy and its operation affects this. But yet a huge number of intelligent people think there's nothing to be learned from this.
Here's another example
Evertonian said:
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?
Insurgent said:
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.
Free trade wasn't working. People were choosing to buy packets of 48 because they perceived them as better value. People COULD now buy 3 packets of 16 and kill themselves that way, but they don't, because they don't perceive 3 packs of 16 as being as good value as 48. But for the libertarian CLEARLY government coercion MUST be causing more problems than it solved, whatever the evidence seems to suggest on the face of it.
