I’m just curious for the new or existing people? Lemmy.ml has taken a hard turn to the right since the reddit exodus. There’s been a lot of pro-imperialist propaganda being posted on world news, and a lot less diversity of opinion. It feels more neoliberal and neo-con to me.
Does anyone want to share what their political leanings are?
I’ll start; I’m anti-imperialist pro-state regulated capitalism. I believe we should have usage based taxes (toll roads, carbon tax) and luxury taxes, and I disagree with wealth taxes for people with less than $250 million. The state should spend more money on consumer protection in all industries (environment, health, finance, etc.) I believe in multipolarity vs. US hegemony.
I get the reasons for most of your points from a perspective of moderate “leftist”. But why “Govt ownership of essential industries like electricity, water, gas”?
You seem to somewhat believe in private enterprise, so why prevent it from providing those services at competitive cost/quality?
Markets work best when there are a number of firms that must compete with one another. For some goods and services, that level of competition is impractical or impossible because of the high amount of infrastructure required. It wouldn’t make much sense for each company to build a completely separate set of water purification and distribution systems—it would be very expensive and take up a lot of space.
In many areas of the US we have a bizarre setup where there is a government enforced monopoly where a single company can reap all of the profits. This often leads to poor service because the company has very little incentive to provide value to its customers. Government owned services can be flawed as well but at least they are directly accountable to their citizens instead of a board or shareholders.
As I said in reply to other person, in my country there’s private businesses providing those services for cheaper price than the government alternative. Infrastructure for the most part is provided by 3rd party.
Also I keep hearing this talk about “government accountability”, but what mechanism of accountability does government have? Private firms at least can go out of business or sued. Government in worst case will just pay you some of its “tax money”
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What you’re describing kind of exists here in Portugal, the transmission lines are owned by the state but the actual electricity generation / internet service / whatever is left to private companies. So you can go onto a web portal and change your supplier to a different electric company or ISP or whatever, without needing to physically do anything at your house. Just maybe exchange a router or something like that. But no builders coming out to the property or whatever. And where I live near Lisbon there are like 8-10 available suppliers.
In my country private companies provide their service much cheaper than government alternative. And, yes they use shared infrastructure.
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