I too have an opinion but cba to discuss it

Okay.

Go away.

Where do you live that companies are owned by the state anyway? Your statement makes no sense.

Generally speaking I thought "privatization" discussion were about what government services ought to be done by private companies. Examples would be:
* School janitorial services
* School busses
* Education in general
* Retirement accounts (move from government Soc Sec to individually held and managed funds)

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.

It's buses.

Go away.

God you're a fucking moron.

You posted the OP, I have commented on it with a question and a suggestion and your reply is fucking "go away". A blithering idiot douche bag is what you are...not moron. I stand corrected.

@ krellin: There are lots of examples of state-owned companies. In the UK for example there are far fewer state-owned firms than there used to be, but still, the UK government owns dozens of companies. A few notable examples include:

- Direct Rail Services (a specialist railway freight company which moves nuclear waste by rail)

- Eurostar International Ltd (a train company which operates passenger rail services between England and France via the Channel Tunnel - jointly owned by the UK government and the French Government)

- The Royal Bank Of Scotland (a large UK bank with worldwide operations)

- Bradford & Bingley plc (a smaller UK bank)

- Royal Mail Group Ltd (the group of companies providing the UK's postal service)

- Royal Mint Ltd (the company that manufactures the UK's coins)


There are quite a few more, those are just some prominent examples of government-owned companies in the UK. Lots of other countries have state-owned companies. It's actually quite commonplace.

Jamie - Fair enough. When "privitization" discussion occur in the US it is generally about what I referred to above. I was not aware of the amount of state-owned industry in the UK. Thank you for correcting me.

I suppose since you actually asked Redhouse where he lived, I could add that I believe Redhouse is from the Netherlands, where, as one example, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, the main passenger railway company in the country, is owned by the state.

That being said, the Red could have provided such an answer, as well, instead of being an ass and ignoring my comments, which were legitimate in terms of the topic.

(Also no worries, krellin - wasn't trying to slap you down or anything, just thought you might be interested)

If he wanted his discussion confined to European Statism, he should have defined it as such in the OP.

Jamie - I didn't take it as a slap-down. As I said, I appreciated your correction.

krellin,

your comment that my statement made "no sense" was misplaced. Since you very often make misplaced comments like that I was annoyed. That being said, JamieT did an excellent job in explaining, although the Nederlandse Spoorwegen has been privatized, be it in a terrible fashion.

Jamie - in the context of my experience, your comment made no sense, as we do not have State owned business in the US as you do....so the very premise of your argument does not apply here...thus is made no sense. Again, if you defined it more clearly in the OP, this confusion would have been avoided.

Your suggestion that I make misplaced comments often is most likely due to such difference in experience and understanding, not my making false or misplaced comments. To *me*, you made a ludicrous statement...call it misplaced, it you will...Do you understand? I suspect such confusion is often the case, as we live in different cultures with different governments and different economic models ruling our lives....

@ Redhouse:

Has it actually been privatized? My understanding was that some routes had been opened up to competition, but that NS as a company itself was still actually state owned?

Sorry -- that was for redhouse, not jamie...my bad.

krellin,

If I'm not mistaken people from your culture, living under your government who live their lives under the same economic rules as you do do tend to find your comments misplaced.

:-)

And talking about confusion, you started that post with Jamie, whereas I'm sure that should've read redhouse.

All that being said -- since you have examples of the very industries you say are state owned being private in the US, why don't you compare outcomes to decide what should/should not be privatized?

redhouse - More often than not, you are mistaking "unwillingness to engage in a discussion when I don't like what you are saying" with "confusion"...

@JamieT, yep that's correct.

@ krellin - Don't the US government technically own Amtrak, the passenger railway company?

In addition I think there are companies owned by the governments of individual states. For example the Gilman Housing Trust is a social housing company owned by the state of Vermont.

-

My bad :-)

(I never really know what exactly it is they did)

@Krellin - the problem with comparisons between countries is that it is very hard to measure cost / benefits for such massive industries. Take for example US healthcare which is, as I understand it, mainly private and UK healthcare which is mainly state run (The NHS) The US spends around 17.6% of GDP on health whereas the UK spend around 9.6% (as of 2010 - source wikipedia). If outcomes were broadly the same, ie life expectancy, cancer treatment rates, waiting times etc then one could argue that sate system is best. But what if life expectancy, cancer treatment rates and waiting times were 10% better in the US. Which is the better system then?

One also has to look at the cultural, political and ideological reasons why different countries have different systems. What works in the US may not work in the neatherlands and what works in the UK might never even be considered in the US.

Amtrak has stock that is owned by the government, I believe, and Amtrak is hardly a success story in the US, but in part that is due to geography and the American car culture...though I don't think the management of Amtrak is anything to brag about.

I think, in fact, that 100% of Amtrak's stock is held by the Government. So that's "government owned", right?

Yes, but it doesn't have "government management", if there is a distinction. It's not like the Post Office, which is truly a part of the government. It has a board of directors or whatever just as a normal "private" company does and therefore can make it's own decision apart from the government. Stock holder does not necessarily equate to "running the company", if you understand the distinction.

I do understand the distinction, krellin, yes - but we were talking about "owned by the state", which this is clearly an example of, even if it is managed at arms' length. We were *talking* about who owns the company, not who makes day-to-day management decisions.

But we can include it in our discussion.

@Jamie - I would argue that there is a distinction. The idea of "privitization" in my mind is taking something that is government owned and moving it to the private sector because government ownership implies government management, and therefore implies bloated management and processes, etc, whereas private ownership typically (at least in the US) would imply chopping heads and streamlining the operation, cutting salaries, etc, and letting market forces dictate size, salaries, prices, etc.

I don't think Amtrak is forced to ignore market conditions because of who owns the stock, whereas if it were truly government owned and operated, they could operate at a loss without worry and just stick their hand out for the next quarter's operating capital.

I think the big problem with Amtrak is that they're locked out of the most lucrative part of their business. The greatest volume of rail travel in the US is on short, high-frequency commuter routes... the T commuter rail in Boston, for example, or the vast network of trains that run to the New York suburbs. These are often, if not always, run by municipal governments or quasi-municipal partnerships. These municipals, however, have little interest in running long-distance rail service because the ridership isn't high enough to pay for itself. So basically the government keeps the routes that can make money and spins off the loss routes to a semi-private, Amtrak. And somehow they expect Amtrak to turn a profit despite retaining only the dregs. In my opinion, for long-distance rail to work, we should do one of two things: either deregulate the whole market and allow Amtrak and other for-profits into the commuter markets as competitors against the quasi-municipals or accept Amtrak as a public service that runs at a loss requiring subsidy. It's the hybrid model that doesn't work. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

What happens in the UK, is that "privatization" happens for purely ideological reasons, and not in order to make those operations more efficient. For that reason Conservative governments in the UK have tended to be bent on privatising state-owned companies, whether or not those companies actually operated with substantial government involvement, or almost completely at arms' length with little or no government management intervention. Both kinds have been equally targeted for privatization over here.

Privitizing without making them efficient is a recipe for destruction, as once the company is privatized, it loses it's golden goose (i.e. government coffers) for operating capital...which is exactly why we (conservatives) seek to privatize things here. We seek to cause inefficient, bloated bureaucracies to become cost-effective and actually meet the customer's needs.

Take for example schools: School on a government budget can waste all they want, and when they run out of money, they threaten to eliminate sports and music programs...causing parents to agree to raise taxes. Never do they look internally for budget cuts and efficiencies until *after* a tax increase proposal is rejected. Further, school that consistently fail to educate kids (as measured by standardized tests and graduation rates...and that's another topic), call for more funding, regardless of their current funding, and they get more funding, don't increase their performance, and then call for more funding, ad infinitum... A Private school - which we are seeing more and more of (Charter schools and the like) have a profit motive, and if they fail to perform to the expectations of the parents, they lose student, lose funding, and go away.

@ krellin: "Privitizing without making them efficient is a recipe for destruction."

You're absolutely right. Britain's railways are a great example. They were privatized for ideological reasons, not reasons of economy, efficiency, or to improve service to passengers. The privatization of our railways was carried out on the basis of:

- "Big government bad! Small government good! How can we get rid of the state railways, quick and dirty as you like?"

Rather than:

- "Perhaps allowing the railways to be privately run would make them more efficient, improve services, and profitable, and thereby remove from the taxpayer the burden of having to subsidise them. How can we most effectively bring that about?"

The result is that our raliways are now much more expensive to travel on, many trains are overcrowded, and, perhaps most strikingly, require FAR MORE PUBLIC SUBSIDY than when they were state owned. Whoops.