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Comment by automatwon | Hacker News Reader

Yes. The role of government is to ensure people can afford basic necessities. When government is competitive with private companies, it's to ensure prices are affordable for people. Uber wants to eliminate competition alltogether. If they become a monopoly, VCs win and consumers lose.

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But the end result is the same.

It doesn't matter who is doing the "price dumping" or what their motivations are.

The effect on society is equally good or bad no matter who is doing the dumping or price gouging.

The difference is the end game. VCs and Investors are expected to ultimately want a profitable company, so after Uber kills competition (Lyft, Public Transit) the price is expected to rise substantially. Public transit is expected to not be profitable, ever and is expected to use the combination of taxes and fees to operate not for profit.

One thing that seems to get completely lost is that these arguments proceed as if we're talking about public transit versus private transit in the abstract, but that's not actually the conversation. What we're talking about is public transits in a localities versus a single corporation nationwide.

Replacing a conglomerate of public local services, beholden to voters, providing essential infrastructure, with single national private monopoly seems like such an obviously bad idea I don't understand how this conversation is taking place.

Maybe we should be arguing in favor of how to make public transportation more competitive in some way, or how to increase diversity of private options, but the idea that we should just hand our national transportation infrastructure over to Uber is just crazy.

Between this and arguments against net neutrality (when we should be forcing more competition onto ISPs and increasing public ISP options), lately I feel like Americans are living in some delusion about the role of the private sector in society.

If the single national private monopoly is BETTER than the local public service, then yes, it should be replaced.

And if that private monopoly ever stops being better, local organizers can make their own competing service. Or just go back to the previous system.

It will be equivalent to society if the private company persists with their subsidized prices. Consumers will stop reaping the price benefits once the private company becomes a monopoly, and changes their prices accordingly.

You can say, well, the pie is fixed and it's just a matter of who gets a bigger of slice of the pie. Consumers or VCs. Is is it equally good to "society" if consumers get a smaller slice of the pie when the private company charges monopoly prices and their owners benefit?

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