The private company that provides water to the area…
Nuff said. There's your private sector heaven, Texans. Privatize everything. Get the gubmint out of the way so business can take off! Eliminate the EPA! Worms in your water, air you can't breathe, fertilizer plants leveling your towns- all a small price to pay to let the invisible hand do its thing, amirite?
after decades of working with a great variety of corporations, I'm not even sure that is true. What many people misunderstand as a private company being more efficient is actually a case of difference in scale, not type. I watched far too many large companies screw up left and right, waste time, resources and money, etc to believe that it's simply a matter of public vs private. The problem is that governments by nature are large institutions with myriad responsibilities. Yet the inevitable comparison is to a ma and pa local business. That is textbook apples and oranges. Of course a simple sole proprietorship with one or two people making all the decisions is efficient. Scale it up though- and not so much. Look at the follies of HP with Carly running it, the nonsense with Sony, the troubles of the big three Detroit automakers and the whole too long to detail history of epic corporate screw ups that have cost companies billions. And none of those companies comes anywhere close to the size and scale of the US government. When you increase size, you increase complexity and you decrease efficiency. The other big difference is that private companies are not required to be as accountable or transparent as government is, so not only do they not have to answer to nearly as many entities, they don't even have to let people know when they screw up. In fact, it's in their best interest not to- something government is statutorily prohibited from doing.
Okay, well normally I stay away from fiscal debates on here, as we will tend to disagree as vehemently as we will agree on social issues.
However, my throwaway comment was not clear, so let me try and reply more fully (whether needed or not!) and maybe find some common ground.
What I should have said was "small to medium-sized" private companies.
Large entities – be they in the private or public sector are, as you point out, horribly wasteful. Centralised behemoths bleed money, resources and waste manpower through far too many layers of bureaucracy.
Surely the answer lies somewhere within a small diverse 'cluster' of companies, all arms-length, all taking ownership of – and being accountable for – their own small part of the overall machine – and in a similar vein, small, local government, accountable to their constituents. Smaller, but necessary, levels of bureaucracy are retained, but kept to an absolute minimum (safety, efficiency, targets, budgets, bonuses)
To me, as a former anarchist, once anarcho-syndicalist and now.. .well, fuck knows, seeing as the word libertarian got taken behind the woodpile and whipped to within an inch of its life! – the larger level of government should be about 'governance': i.e. making sure things run smoothly.
Just because Large L Libertarians have in places, like in Texas, seized control of an extremely deranged version of 'free market' companies-as-people bullshit, shouldn't tar all the small-l libertarian think-tanks with the same brush.
Just as annoying for you would be someone pointing at Stalin or Pol Pot or any other communist/totalitarian statist and declaring "well Socialism obviously doesn't work". Similarly, everyone throwing the baby out with the bathwater because of the demented objectivists, tea partyists and Scott Walker zero-tax ideologues are to myself.
We're all trying to build a better world, and to my mind, bigger is certainly far from better.
Ownership of the means of production. Have a nice weekend. Peace out.
Actually, I agree with most of that- there can be plenty of overlap between liberalism and small L libertarianism as far as I'm concerned. My only real point is that for many of the large L true believers, it has become a matter of accepted fact that all private sector businesses are by definition always better than government in any form, and that simply isn't true. I think the model of letting capitalism drive innovation and growth, while using the mechanisms of government to ride herd on the inevitable abuses, i.e. managed capitalism, is probably the best compromise. Let each do what it does best and recognize that each is an important part of the equation. To me, what passes for libertarianism these days is nothing more than an elaborate rationalisation for excusing greed and has little to nothing to do with what it was supposed to be about.
Interestingly, your comment hung in the pending folder- I have no idea why. I'm glad I happened to check.
Thanks, sorry to be cagey, but as I've been shot at by both sides (fiscal conservative but socially liberal: aka "hypocrite", "idiot" or "troll" depending on who's firing) in forums – before padding about and curling up in this here delightful snarky cottage of Wonk – I'm wary of making a misstep.
There are ideologues and dogma on both sides of the aisle, but I'm glad if there's a little space for cementing some common ground or 'in general' theorising. After all, nobody's come up with the perfect socioeconomic system.. yet 😉
BTW yeah I think there's an issue with Intense Debate if one logged in/set up originally via WordPress account. smokefilledroommate IIRC has a similar problem?
Anyway, for me, sometimes my articles/linkies snag, sometimes my comments get flagged. Hey ho!
….the pipes that are producing the worms.
THE WORMS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!
Red Wigglers- the Cadillac of Worms!
TIL that pipes reproduce in the form of worms.
/FFS
The private company that provides water to the area…
Nuff said. There's your private sector heaven, Texans. Privatize everything. Get the gubmint out of the way so business can take off! Eliminate the EPA! Worms in your water, air you can't breathe, fertilizer plants leveling your towns- all a small price to pay to let the invisible hand do its thing, amirite?
it's a job killer
those job killing regulations
T'killya
Private companies are more efficient, but you still need regulation to control these sociopathic entities.
Kehrrist, these fucking Objectivist assholes!
Private companies are more efficient
after decades of working with a great variety of corporations, I'm not even sure that is true. What many people misunderstand as a private company being more efficient is actually a case of difference in scale, not type. I watched far too many large companies screw up left and right, waste time, resources and money, etc to believe that it's simply a matter of public vs private. The problem is that governments by nature are large institutions with myriad responsibilities. Yet the inevitable comparison is to a ma and pa local business. That is textbook apples and oranges. Of course a simple sole proprietorship with one or two people making all the decisions is efficient. Scale it up though- and not so much. Look at the follies of HP with Carly running it, the nonsense with Sony, the troubles of the big three Detroit automakers and the whole too long to detail history of epic corporate screw ups that have cost companies billions. And none of those companies comes anywhere close to the size and scale of the US government. When you increase size, you increase complexity and you decrease efficiency. The other big difference is that private companies are not required to be as accountable or transparent as government is, so not only do they not have to answer to nearly as many entities, they don't even have to let people know when they screw up. In fact, it's in their best interest not to- something government is statutorily prohibited from doing.
Okay, well normally I stay away from fiscal debates on here, as we will tend to disagree as vehemently as we will agree on social issues.
However, my throwaway comment was not clear, so let me try and reply more fully (whether needed or not!) and maybe find some common ground.
What I should have said was "small to medium-sized" private companies.
Large entities – be they in the private or public sector are, as you point out, horribly wasteful. Centralised behemoths bleed money, resources and waste manpower through far too many layers of bureaucracy.
Surely the answer lies somewhere within a small diverse 'cluster' of companies, all arms-length, all taking ownership of – and being accountable for – their own small part of the overall machine – and in a similar vein, small, local government, accountable to their constituents. Smaller, but necessary, levels of bureaucracy are retained, but kept to an absolute minimum (safety, efficiency, targets, budgets, bonuses)
To me, as a former anarchist, once anarcho-syndicalist and now.. .well, fuck knows, seeing as the word libertarian got taken behind the woodpile and whipped to within an inch of its life! – the larger level of government should be about 'governance': i.e. making sure things run smoothly.
Just because Large L Libertarians have in places, like in Texas, seized control of an extremely deranged version of 'free market' companies-as-people bullshit, shouldn't tar all the small-l libertarian think-tanks with the same brush.
Just as annoying for you would be someone pointing at Stalin or Pol Pot or any other communist/totalitarian statist and declaring "well Socialism obviously doesn't work". Similarly, everyone throwing the baby out with the bathwater because of the demented objectivists, tea partyists and Scott Walker zero-tax ideologues are to myself.
We're all trying to build a better world, and to my mind, bigger is certainly far from better.
Ownership of the means of production. Have a nice weekend. Peace out.
Actually, I agree with most of that- there can be plenty of overlap between liberalism and small L libertarianism as far as I'm concerned. My only real point is that for many of the large L true believers, it has become a matter of accepted fact that all private sector businesses are by definition always better than government in any form, and that simply isn't true. I think the model of letting capitalism drive innovation and growth, while using the mechanisms of government to ride herd on the inevitable abuses, i.e. managed capitalism, is probably the best compromise. Let each do what it does best and recognize that each is an important part of the equation. To me, what passes for libertarianism these days is nothing more than an elaborate rationalisation for excusing greed and has little to nothing to do with what it was supposed to be about.
Interestingly, your comment hung in the pending folder- I have no idea why. I'm glad I happened to check.
Thanks, sorry to be cagey, but as I've been shot at by both sides (fiscal conservative but socially liberal: aka "hypocrite", "idiot" or "troll" depending on who's firing) in forums – before padding about and curling up in this here delightful snarky cottage of Wonk – I'm wary of making a misstep.
There are ideologues and dogma on both sides of the aisle, but I'm glad if there's a little space for cementing some common ground or 'in general' theorising. After all, nobody's come up with the perfect socioeconomic system.. yet 😉
BTW yeah I think there's an issue with Intense Debate if one logged in/set up originally via WordPress account. smokefilledroommate IIRC has a similar problem?
Anyway, for me, sometimes my articles/linkies snag, sometimes my comments get flagged. Hey ho!