It should not really be controversial. Classic liberal economics (from e.g. John Stuart Mill and on) generally acknowledges that natural monopolies exist and that it's generally beneficial for everyone if they are publicly owned.

To play devils advocate, in NYC which has a massive transit network. There exists a series of private transit "companies" (sometimes just a guy with a 10 person van), that provides routes that are poorly served by the publicly run transit network. The famous Chinatown buses would be another example, that run between Chinatowns in the North East, are incredibly cheap, fast, and are profitable.

It's only an anathema to those who want to buy the world we were all born into and rent back the air you breath every day until you die.

There's no reason we should want this for ourselves.

Hello from Québec! Yes, with the right structure and guardrails in place, you definitely get better costs for citizens and businesses. Citizens can also petition the government when something needs fixing, which is better than "fuck you if you're not a shareholder".

For an example of the opposite, you can unfortunately look at the Canadian telcom oligopoly.

Private/public matters a lot less than if a system allows competition or not. There are a few infrastructure pieces (e.g. those that cross public land and unowned private property) that make sense to be publicly managed, but probably not as much as one might assume. e.g. Subway tunnels would be much better utilized if they allowed autonomous vehicles to operate in them instead of trains.

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.

Natural monopolies should always be run by the state.

It’s not that controversial; usually I end up arguing with people who don’t believe utilities are natural monopolies rather than no government control. They usually point to starlink with the internet and solar + battery on power as incumbents that don’t need public easement. But that easement is too hard to compete with still imo and we ought to just have a public option.

I'm definitely on board with governments owning stuff - I think the traditional issue has been that government jobs don't attract the best talent (lower pay / whatever). So the types of people that go to government jobs are the ones that like stability and moving slow. That's probably fine - but it has also given them the reputation for being really inefficient.

The natural response is to assume that corporation will be more efficient, and there the consumer will get a better end result. And, again, that was probably true for some period of time. The problem is in a corporate world you need to grow your profits by 3-5% a year (minimum) in order to be considered a "viable" investment. So what happens when your customer base isn't growing at 3-5%? Well you cut costs to improve your profits or you raise prices or both.

End result is the consumer ends up worse off, they got a one-time efficiency gain by switching from government to corporate - but then pay for that over decades.

This was the platform of Katter’s Australian Party.

Instead the Electricity Board got privatised with promises of lower prices. Electric prices tracked inflation and general cpi from when Queensland electrified until privitasation in 1997.

Since then prices have gone up about 75% beyond inflation.

My last two energy providers have been coops. In north eastern California, the coop had one feed from PG&E and the other from a company out of Reno (I forget the name). It ended up being cheaper and more stable than PG&E itself.

I get it when there's an obvious natural monopoly, and an alternative is just infeasible to build.

I don't think it applies to electricity in many cases. If there are investors in building new electrical capacity, then it likely means that the area is underserved, and the prices are naturally higher. The government apparently did not build what the market is ready to pay a premium for.

The original Edison's electric company was private, and for-profit. It started selling electricity in 1882. I wonder how soon would a government-owned company manage instead.

I'd prefer them to be mostly municipal or collectively owned by multiple municipalities over making them state-owned. Obviously power generation is big enough for it to be state-owned to be a workable choice.

Personally, I would like to see more competition in some of those spaces. But if the government is going to enforce any sort of competitive restrictions, it should go all the way and own it. For electricity, they could own the transmission lines and allow competitors to generate and sell electricity. The government could then charge a fixed monthly fee per connection (based on capacity, so industrial users would pay a lot more than homeowners for their connections).

Crazy that we need to keep relearning this over and over again.

Agreed, though it's society owning, not government. Practically the same thing, but "government-owned" makes it sound like an adversarial entity and some anti-establishment folks may feel good (or entitled, even) damaging such things. But they then just hurt all of us since it's owned by all of us. (Cf. current protests in France)

This is not sacrilege. It is for the common good. Some people, however, would profit off the immiseration of others, by profiting off of charging higher prices for essentials, regardless of the degree to which the buyer can afford the price gouging.

Most of the best public infrastructure is state owned but privately operated, like Sweden and Singapore’s transit systems. But the ownership model is less important than other things. Japan’s world leading training infrastructure is privately owned and operated. By contrast, almost all of the United States’s terrible transit systems are publicly owned and operated. Water is a public utility and almost all the United States and the water systems are in terrible disrepair.

The problem with public ownership is that it drives price is too low because it allows people to vote on prices. Your average age 60+ voter doesn’t care if lowering the water bill now means that the system will be in bad repair 30 or 50 years from now.

At the end of the day, there is no magic policy bullet to fix problems with the people. Public infrastructure in the US sucks whether it’s publicly owned or privately owned. But I bet if the Japanese trains were publicly owned instead of privately owned, they would still be pretty good.

There is a lot of writing and philosophy on this exact issue - state owned enterprise, partial to complete deregulation, state operated enterprises, etc.

At the end of the day it will be about tradeoffs. CA/TX and others "deregulated" electricity by splitting the public-side (transmission and distribution) as heavily regulated from the generators and consumer purchasing sides. In TX, nominally, this lowered rates, though it has been some time since I researched this space. What it also did was cause pretty bad second order effects for transmission providers since they can't exclude use of their owned networks due to the physics of grids. It also caused underinvestment in the grid, causing the major freeze-outs and near-collapse of the natural gas delivery pipelines that made the news.

There CAN be advantages to bringing in private enterprise, but, they need fairly strict oversight to not cash out/distribute the funds needed for infrastructure O&M/new build to shareholders.

Not controversial at all. Unless you're a purist who believes the state shouldn't own or operate any businesses, the only real advantage of privatization is the potential influx of capital that could be invested in modernizing infrastructure. In today's turbulent world, we're seeing how keeping such infrastructure under state ownership can be not only more practical but also more secure.

Why would it be sacrilege to say that? It seems entirely reasonable.

You are 100% correct.

Maybe in principle but as practice in many countries show governments suck at planning. We need more electricity everywhere in Western world and governments failed big time even though there were signs hard to ignore - not only compute but also electric cars.

At least make it easy to build powerplants for determined private enterprises to speed-up progress where governments fail.

This argument doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, IMO.

Say you have a section of urban highway that is severely congested. If roads are a profit-center, congestion is a strong market signal--demand outstrips supply! More people want to use your product, but your supply is insufficient. The obvious solution is to build more supply. Until you do, you're leaving money on the table! Quick, expand the road! Build a tunnel! Do something!

The exact opposite logic applies when roads are a public good. They become a cost-center, and any concern about meeting demand becomes subordinate to a thousand other concerns. The costs of building and maintaining roads remain real and immediate (They cost money! NIMBYs hate construction!), but the benefits of building and maintaining roads become abstract and distant (the benefits are: fewer complaints? More economic activity in the long run?) The laws of supply and demand no longer apply, and you find people saying insane things like "Why should we expand that congested highway? Expanding it will only draw more cars, and then it will still be congested!". In a free market, such nonsense is unthinkable. No business would ever say "Demand is so far in excess of supply that increasing supply is pointless!" Yet as soon as market incentives are removed, this nonsense becomes the default.

Every day on my commute, I spend ~30 minutes driving 80 MPH on private highway, and the instant I hit the public highway I am in bumper-to-bumper traffic, as one of the most congested stretches of 4-lane highway in one of the largest cities in the country is reduced to two lanes as it passes under another highway. It costs me 30 minutes of my life every day, and there are no current plans to resolve this bottleneck. The notion that public roads are saving me from evil rent-seeking capitalists is just silly. I prefer self-interested capitalists to incompetent public administrators.

This isn't to say that roads should be totally deregulated--incentives matter, and the state has a legitimate role to play in ensuring that consumers are protected from malicious actors. But the incentives associated with public ownership are so perverse that it's hard to imagine a private option resulting in worse outcomes.

> at worst they strip the infrastructure of all value without any maintenance, getting taxpayers to build it again.

The worst-case scenario for privatization is the default scenario with public ownership!