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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

They were nationalized, once, and were privatized by the electorate something like 20 years ago. I remember people debating it as a kid

edit - I'm looking this up and having trouble finding evidence of this outside of AB 1980 (proposition to break the state-sanctioned monopoly and allow competition among energy suppliers), which was from 1996

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Interesting. Didn’t know that history. Kind of wonder what the arguments in favor of privatization were given that doing so doesn’t seem to have resulted in any meaningful upgrades or better outcomes.

"Private companies are more efficient" is one of those things that's been said often enough that it becomes a "truth".

This obviously doesn't pan out when you've got a monopoly or captive audience. Around me we have a choice of energy retailers, so we get to deal with the "efficiency" of several competing bureaucracies instead of the "bloated" government one.

Politicians love it because it abstracts them from any accountability to the people, even our left wing parties are pro-privatization these days.

A private monopoly on its absolute worst day would still operate more efficiently than a federal or state power agency. One still has a bottom line, the other just has meetings to look busy.

Not really. A dysfunctional private monopoly will go as bad as they can go without having people just abandon a product/service category entirely. Which, in case of captive audience or a necessity, can be really bad. Oh, and with falling quality prices can still go up - it's a monopoly, after all, it's not like customers can go elsewhere.

Actually, India has public utilities and most of the common cause for loss is Theft, at multiple levels.

A private company would eradicate it since its effecting the bottom line, but public companies may choose to ignore because the people stealing may be a voting bloc to curry favor.

It may not be the case in US, but you are trading one set of problems with another and that is the best case.

A private company would eradicate it since its effecting the bottom line

Say what? PG&E diverted money earmarked for safety to executive bonuses. Is that not graft?

I think by theft GP meant "random citizens stealing infrastructural elements made from copper for scrap value" and stuff like this. A private entity ready to steal from people or itself still won't tolerate outsiders stealing from them.

Good thing theft is a criminal act which is the domain of the state.

The nationalized one was probably a shitty monopoly too that had no incentive too improve since it could just beg the legislature for more budget

I’d predict it also tied up the collective conscious on funding its own mundane internal issues

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