People on this thread forget that when legislatures cut funding, governments also defer maintenance on the infrastructure; especially since you mention roads and transit: governments tend to underfund both of these. Private companies of course do the same when shareholders demand more profit. It’s the same.

The rest of your point I agree, but good maintenance is not a given regardless of private ownership or government ownership. In fact I would say this is part of being a monopoly: there are no competitors and no market forces to compete on reliability.

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cogman10 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The difference is that we elect the officials in charge of the roads.

Of course they all like to push off maintenance as long as possible to avoid tax increases, but they will do them. Private industry will literally choose to wait for failure rather than do maintenance because they've discovered things can last longer than expected and they save more money by waiting for a catastrophe (and they can extra more government funds as they "don't have the resources" to fix a problem. See california's PG&E [1]).

The perfect example of this is the train system in the US and the problem we have with derailments. The US has more derailments than basically anyone else and the reason for this is that the rail owners aren't doing maintenance.

[1] https://www.actionnewsnow.com/news/top-stories/is-pg-e-press...

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m000 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> governments also defer maintenance on the infrastructure; especially since you mention roads and transit

Roads are the outliers here because governments usually have direct oversight on them. They are more infrastructure rather than utilities.

Unlike roads, everything else discussed here (electricity, water, sewage, transit), even when public, is operated by a public company, not the government. Maintenance is part of the company's operating costs and is accounted for in the price consumer pays. And while there is no competition for reliability, there's also no obligation to maximize profits for the shareholders.

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Arkhaine_kupo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> good maintenance is not a given regardless of private ownership or government ownership.

Its not about maintenance, its about pure math and efficiency.

Natural monopolies have 0 advantage in terms of price discovery, therefore there are no market forces. And you get all the disadvantages of a monopoly without any of the advantages of capitalism.

Many purely capitalist countries still advocate for natural monopolies to be goverment run (Norway oil being public, Singapore owning all the land and housing, Spain having public healthcare) and all of those examples beat countries that have privately owned natural monopolies.

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trollbridge 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Cleveland has had two sets of power lines for a long time (despite FirstEnergy’s many attempts to shut down Cleveland Public Power). It’s not necessarily a natural monopoly.

Instead it one where incumbents try very hard to convince everyone it must be a monopoly.

	▲	Arkhaine_kupo 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It’s not necessarily a natural monopoly. Having a private market does not make something not a natural monopoly. Healthcare, education, land, and energy are famously cases where market forces do not find a lowest possible price floor. the main things that cause a natural monopoly are things like high initial cost, a lower cost per unit created and the most important one a sub-additive cost function. If you have a single healthcare provider for example and 2 hospitals, you can have 1 IT team to handle both medical records, that is one engineering team, 1 database, 1 security team and then you have the costs that cannot be saved such as doctors nurses and staff in each hospital. Meanwhile if you have 2 healthcare providers you need 2 engineering teams, 2 dbs, and 2 cyber teams while the cost of doctors, nurses and staff remains untouched. That added cost makes the "competition" subadditive. You lose more than you gain by having multiple players in the market. Which is why American's spend more in healthcare than single payer systems like the ones in Europe. Just plain old boring math. And its not even a new concept. Adam Smith calls landlords "leeches" in his works
	▲	OGWhales 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't think 1 vs 2 players is meaningful enough difference to make that an actual competitive market.