Posted on 10/04/2007 1:13:26 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
> ibtz
Yeah right. There is nothing zottable about observing that where there is no risk, there should be no reward.
That is about as Capitalist as life gets. That is a core Conservative value.
Providing core infrastructure has been risk-free for a very, very long time. Profit is the just reward for taking risks.
There is not and never was any risk associated with taking assets that were once-upon-a-time state owned and state-built and state-paid-for, and operating them.
So it boggles the mind to see where there should be any profit: it has not been earned.
No risk = No Reward.
> Since Jun 22, 2007
Oh, and welcome to the Free Republic.
> You forgot Healthcare, healthcare should be free too :)
Done properly, socialized healthcare isn’t a bad thing: I was pretty glad of it when I had my first heart-attack scare.
The problem with Healthcare is that there is still plenty of risk surrounding its provision. Taking risk should be rewarded by making profit because taking risk is often really expensive.
What ends up happening is that Healthcare gets provided at a really basic level (the risk-free bits) and then everyone complains about not having free access to the risky bits. That is why Healthcare is and will continue to be a bottomless pit into which to pour money. People just won’t understand why Grandma can’t have her life-saving procedure: nevermind that it costs two million dollars per and fails three times out of ten.
Electricity, gas, public transport, telecommunications — they aren’t in the same league as healthcare. Nobody ever went broke providing a utility service once all the kinks were sorted out.
> By making it so that governent is the only provider of the utilities you list above, you ensure only that those utilities will become poorer in quality, more expensive, and less reliable.
Oddly enough, this hasn’t been the case in NZ, particularly with water.
Watercare is a company with a monopoly on the provision of water, wastewater and stormwater services to the Auckland region. It is 100% owned by the cities that make up the Auckland region: it is, essentially, a local government service.
Our potable water in Auckland is the finest in the world: it has won awards. It is very, very pure, it tastes nice, and it comes out of your tap for a ridiculously cheap price.
Only a poseur in Auckland buys bottled water: it is processed to a quality standard that is much, much lower than what comes freely from the tap. Most folks don’t know that, but it is so.
In an environment where there is no competition — but there *is* considerable political pressure to keep the population happy — Watercare have nothing to strive for except to provide the very, very best water services that they can. And so they do: their political masters make sure of that.
Sure, it is possible that private enterprise might be able to provide water cheaper. But making profit is about taking risks, and one of those risks in the provision of water would inevitably be trying to ascertain the minimum quality standard that would still pass muster, matched against the maximum amount that could be reasonably charged for this minimalist water — because that would be what drove the profit curve.
Without that profit incentive, Watercare focuses instead on providing the best available for our rates dollar. We like it like that.
Who pays for that service? Does the service pay for itself, or is it subsidized by the government (and the taxpayer)?
How are the employees, including the officers, who work for that company hired? Are they appointed?
> Who pays for that service? Does the service pay for itself, or is it subsidized by the government (and the taxpayer)?
Every ratepayer (that’s what we call people who pay property tax) pays a Water Levy against each rates bill. This levy is set by the city, and represents the price that they on-sell Watercare’s services for. The city, in turn, contracts with Watercare for these services.
> How are the employees, including the officers, who work for that company hired?
The same way most city workers are hired: the Board hires the CEO, and the CEO hires the workers, usually using the services of recruiting agencies.
> Are they appointed?
The Board is appointed by the cities that own Watercare.
The quality of phone service has improved beyond belief, and costs have plummeted, especially for long distance. It cost me less to cal Bangkok than it used to cost me to call Charleston. What are these unmet promises?
I don't think you'll find much in those industries operating on any patent more than 20 years old. Yet you have a very odd notion that people only take risk and only deserve a profit when they innovate. By your way of thinking farming, carpentry, bricklaying, cooking, transportation, etc. should all be nationalized.
You have no God given right to electricity, and certainly no on is obligated to provide it to you for free.
Some things are baseline requirements for an advanced Civilization to exist. And without these requirements the population take a big step backwards toward subsistence.
Then why are you so adverse to paying the going rate for them? You have a very strong sense of entitlement.
I contend that such baseline requirements are essential, and that a wise civilization would recognize that and absorb their provision for the common good.
Absorb their provision? Free bread to the masses and all that huh? Nonsense. If you want to keep modern civilization you'd do well to keep people vested in providing those services you deem so important.
There is no risk in providing essential services. Therefore, there should be no profit in doing so.
You are wrong. There is a lot of risk. Only when the government runs it, is there no risk. You have this imagined viewpoint that every essential must also be a protected monopoly. Do you have no experience with business at all? I'm curious as to what the risk is in your occupation.
Or decent, basic medical care? Or decent, basic education?
Government systems suck. I much prefer private. And if it weren't for the private American pharmaceutical companies, there would be almost no innovation at all in modern medicine. Socialized medicine has killed innovation and the development of new drugs and technology.
I argue that core infrastructure also belongs in that group. And again on the premise that there is no risk associated with providing core infrastructure, so there should be no financial reward or profit for doing so.
Again, no risk only if its done by a government that doesn't care about wasted money. Want a new bridge? Great here's $50million, doesn't matter in the least if only 30 people use it a week.
You do realize that the money spent by the government isn't pulled out of a hat right?
Risk = Reward. No Risk = No Reward. It doesn’t get much more Capitalist than that.
What can I say? You don't understand basic economics and the value of capitalism. You think that someone that spends $300 million on a new power plant where they must compete against other plants to sell electricity on the open market has no risk. There is no guarantee what so ever that if they will make a profit. They must constantly work to be efficient and dependable.
And incidentally, profit is proportionate to risk, but also to effort. Did you take any risk today? Did you get paid.
You want a nanny state that allows you out to play when the stakes aren't too important. I'm a grownup, and prefer a world of fellow grownups.
> You have no God given right to electricity, and certainly no on is obligated to provide it to you for free.
If the Government (read: “we”) have built the infrastructure with tax dollars, we own it. In which case I do indeed have the God-given right to electricity: it is bought and paid for already.
On the same basis, I have the God-given right to Law Enforcement, and to protection from enemies foreign-and-domestic. That is already bought and paid for, with taxes.
> Yet you have a very odd notion that people only take risk and only deserve a profit when they innovate. By your way of thinking farming, carpentry, bricklaying, cooking, transportation, etc. should all be nationalized.
If I have paid for their tools and their apprenticeships and if I feed their families thru my tax dollars, then too darn right their services have already been paid for. No need for them to make any additional profit: and there need be nothing left over for “shareholders”. They have no risk, so they should have no reward.
> Then why are you so adverse to paying the going rate for them? You have a very strong sense of entitlement.
Too bloody right: because they have already been bought and paid for. If you buy and pay for something, you are entitled. That is what the taxpayers in NZ have done, over successive generations, for hydroelectricity, gas, water, wastewater, stormwater, rail, airlines and telecommunications. Bought. Paid for by taxpayer. Entitled. Get it?
> Do you have no experience with business at all?
As it happens, yes.
> I’m curious as to what the risk is in your occupation.
Formerly a risk manager for one of the Big Four. In my current occupation, my risk is getting killed or crippled.
> What can I say? You don’t understand basic economics and the value of capitalism. You think that someone that spends $300 million on a new power plant where they must compete against other plants to sell electricity on the open market has no risk. There is no guarantee what so ever that if they will make a profit. They must constantly work to be efficient and dependable.
Interesting theories that have not been borne out by events as they have unfolded.
We used to have a vertically-integrated electricity sector, owned by the Government. Ditto telecommunications. Ditto rail. Ditto airlines. Ditto water, wastewater and stormwater. Ditto ports. All worked reasonably well, if perhaps a bit inefficiently.
Now, much of that has privatized, because some pointy-headed intellectual figured that “obviously” the private sector could do a better job than the “government” at running core infrastructure. They probably got their pointy-headed MBAs at the same school you did.
The outcome? Prices have skyrocketed, bucketloads of “profit” have siphoned off to overseas shareholders, “competition” hasn’t happened, and the only people benefitting from this new scheme of arrangement are faceless “shareholders”.
You can argue until you are blue in the face, but those are the plain facts.
There are some things that are just too dam’n important to a Nation’s wellbeing to be entrusted to Free Enterprise. That’s why sometimes Government monopolies are a good thing.
> You want a nanny state that allows you out to play when the stakes aren’t too important. I’m a grownup, and prefer a world of fellow grownups.
No, actually you are a mug, playing a mug’s game. Not to worry, leave it to us grownups to organize your essential services for you collectively. That is what Civilization and Government is all about: achieving efficiencies by building critical mass, centrally funded by all participants.
If that concept is too hard to grasp, consider this: why is it always more expensive to buy pizza by the slice, than it is to buy the whole pie? And why is it more expensive to buy pizzas one-at-a-time rather than taking up the two-for-one deal?
And why should you pay for your pizza when you have already paid for the oven, the electricity/gas that runs it, the ingredients, the labor to make it, and the rent to house your restaurant in, and the that taxes you will inevitably owe by being industrious? You shouldn’t: you own it, it’s yours, buon appetito.
So far as I am concerned, I am a vocal supporter of America.
I can feel the love. America bashing...how unique. Very sophisticated.
Yours is a beautiful country. Salute your Union Jack for me.
> I can feel the love. America bashing...how unique. Very sophisticated.
“America bashing.” If America cannot take on board gentle, justified and well-earned rebuke from a FRiend, then that speaks volumes in and of itself.
I pointed out that it is “boorish behavior” to let off nuclear bombs on somebody else’s paradisical island home (people who are not enemies and never were), making it so that they can never, ever live their simple, subsistence lives in their homes ever again, uprooting them and relocating them instead, without their permission, to lead squalid existence on islands that they never lived on and do not like.
I don’t believe that is America bashing at all. It is pointing out the bloody obvious smokin’ red hot Gospel Truth. Sometimes the Truth hurts. But it is a very just assessment, and I believe “boorish” is actually on the mild side of the spectrum of terms I could have used to describe America’s behavior in the South Pacific post WW-II.
Somehow “naughty” or “impolite” doesn’t quite describe it adequately. No, “boorish” would be about as diplomatic as it gets — anything less won’t do.
Do you disagree? Perhaps America should have tried out the nuclear bomb tests in Hawaii, see how well it went down with their fellow Americans living there. I’m sure they would use terms quite a bit stronger than “boorish”.
It would seem that America has been in the habit, for the past 200 years or more, of behaving poorly to indigenous inhabitants of lands that America does not own. Just ask the Indians, see if they might characterize that behavior by “boorish” — I rather suspect they would use language that is quite a bit more salty, but I could be wrong.
And what a shameful waste and a pity: America did so much good, and generated so much goodwill, in the South Pacific during WW-II. Yet all of that was squandered by the foolish decision to make a few islands glow. No, the more I think about it, “boorish” is about as gentle a term as can be used, without leaving any room for doubt or misinterpretation. That’s not America Bashing, that’s merely telling it like it is.
And I believe I used the same terminology for France. That was unfair. “Boorish” doesn’t quite capture the French way of doing things in the South Pacific, at all. “Criminal” is on the mild side of the spectrum of suitable terms to describe their behavior in the South Pacific. They went way beyond “boorish”, as only France can when it has the wrong leaders at the wheel. What a shameful waste, too! Because the French people are fantastic, generally, and their Credibility just after WW-II was at an all-time high.
Squandered by a succession of meat-headed French governments that still needed convincing that Nuclear warheads do, indeed, still go “bang” and make a glow-in-the-dark mess of beautiful places like Mururoa Atoll.
As if there was ever any doubt.
> Yours is a beautiful country. Salute your Union Jack for me.
America is a beautiful country, too: I have seen much of it, and I generally like and admire her people.
We don’t salute the Union Jack or any other flag for that matter in New Zealand. That too seems to be a habit that is mostly observed by America and France.
Without any doubt; everything you say here is true. However; what you describe is not the historical behavior of America, but the historical behavior of all mankind.
While it is a high compliment to be held to a higher standard, is does get tiresome.
How you think America's behavior 200 years ago relates to this thread, or my point, is beyond me.
That all the infrastructures of Noo Zeelund were provided by the taxpayers of a distant empire, does not mean the rest of the worlds were.
> How you think America’s behavior 200 years ago relates to this thread, or my point, is beyond me.
Let’s make it simple: you objected to my use of the term “boorish” with relation to America’s treatment of indigenous people in the South Pacific, and felt that I was America Bashing.
I pointed out that this behavior was far from a one-off, that it seemed to make up a standard modus operandi for your Nation — as is demonstrated by 200+ years of your Nation’s treatment of the Indians. And that they would probably agree with that assessment — at the very least.
> While it is a high compliment to be held to a higher standard, is does get tiresome.
America does an immense amount of good, disproportionate in many ways to other Nations. And, I suppose with some justification, Americans wonder why people “bash” them as a result. I suppose that all comes down to scale: Fiji, for example, has recently gone thru a series of activities that are best described as “boorish” — the place goes thru a never-ending series of military coups d’etat. But again, it comes down to scale: in the grand scheme of things, Fiji doesn’t have A-Bombs and even if the dictator-of-the-day were to get really, really *boorish*, nobody’s island is going to glow-in-the-dark for the next few million years.
Countries like America and France, on the other hand — well, their footprint is a little less difficult to ignore because your Nations operate at on a much larger scale and tend to do things in much bigger, noisier ways.
And that is why you are held to a higher standard. As they say DownUnder, “the whale that doesn’t spout avoids the harpoon.”
> That all the infrastructures of Noo Zeelund were provided by the taxpayers of a distant empire, does not mean the rest of the worlds were.
To the best of my knowledge, the British Empire paid not one red cent towards New Zealand’s infrastructure. If anything, New Zealand subsidized the British way of life, for at least a century-and-a-half, with cheap agricultural and pastoral products.
Our taxpayers have paid their own way, pretty much from the start. Countries can do that when they organize themselves properly and exercise parsimony and fiscal prudence.
OK. Let's not discuss the effects of nationalizing free enterprises, such as wireless internet. Let's talk about how "boorish" America is.
Why only America? Why not New Zealand? Free of boorish behavior are we? Everyone there got their merit badge in map reading, have they? No mistreatment of your indigenous discussed in the history books? Isn't it true that some New Zealanders beat their wives?
Rudeness, stupidity, and cruelty are hardly unique to America. Only blame, and a higher standard for them is.
I would hope that any country would aspire to becoming a people of a higher standard. Why do you not apply it to New Zealand?
You were part of the British Empire for many years, and remain part of her Commonwealth. Great Britain's offer of independence was rejected in favor of having a caretaker. Only after being disenchanted with Britains ability to protect her from the Japanese, did New Zealand finally accept the offer...after 16 years!
To say "the British Empire paid not one red cent towards New Zealand’s infrastructure" is ungrateful, and insulting to Brits.
It is typically human to take for granted that which is provided....whether its wireless internet, or protection from the Japanese.
Minneapolis ran a pilot, of a square mile. They had it up and running last sept using belair equipment. Not sure if they have started to expand yet. Chicago canceled it's plans to wi-fi the city, it was too costly and people weren't using it. My network on the other hand is very profitable. :-) But I'm not telling where it is, however it is amongst the largest in the east. The problem is that these 'free' networks aren't free of course, someone has to pay for the upkeep and initial cost of it as well as provide the service wrap. The best way to mitigate that cost is by charging the users.
> To say “the British Empire paid not one red cent towards New Zealand’s infrastructure” is ungrateful, and insulting to Brits.
It also happens to be true. British tax money did not buy our infrastructure. Tax money and capital investment raised in New Zealand bought it. Most of our infrastructure was built AFTER NZ became a Dominion.
I guess NZ “insulted” the British by donating the highest number of casualties per capita during WW-I — we just marked the anniversary of Passchendaele, where on a single day 2,700 NZ soldiers were blown to bits. Often overshadowed by Gallipoli, 7571 NZ casualties including 2,431 dead.
The Battle of Britain had 126 NZ Pilots flying, second only to Poland for foreign pilots to defend the Mother Country from the Hun.
In all, 22 Victoria Cross medals going to New Zealand troops, which included the only combat soldier in history (Charles Upham) to receive it twice.
In all, not too bad an “insult” from a couple of small islands in the middle of the South Pacific, with an overall population smaller than Seattle. One that the Brits probably would not mind at all.
Anything that we may nominally have “owed” to the British Empire was certainly paid for during the Boer War, World War I and World War II. On that basis, I’m sure the British Empire would be quite happy to acknowledge that our tax payers paid for their own infrastructure: as was the usual way in the British Empire.
> No mistreatment of your indigenous discussed in the history books?
Sure — some of the more greedy Pakeha promptly violated the Treaty of Waitangi and proceeded to rob the Maori blind. Certainly boorish behavior. An entire war was fought over that on NZ soil, to a stand-still. And reparations are being paid to this very day, with a custom-made Waitangi Tribunal to ensure that these wrongs are made right.
> Rudeness, stupidity, and cruelty are hardly unique to America. Only blame, and a higher standard for them is.
If America were as good at exporting its virtues as it is in exporting its vices, you might find that much of that criticism would probably go away.
America has a very, very loud horn that it tends to toot: it is impossible to ignore and America therefore calls attention to itself. Japan for example doesn’t — even tho’ Japan should be wide open to severe criticism over some of the things that it does. Sure, that isn’t fair or just: perhaps Japan should be held to a similarly higher standard.
But Japan merely goes about quietly minding its own business, and does not invite the close scrutiny that may well reveal matters to be criticised. A classic example of speaking softly and carrying a big stick.
“It isn’t a matter of socialism, it’s a matter of attracting businesses to the city.”
Unless, of course, you’re a competing internet provider, in which case, you won’t be so attracted to Paris at the moment.
“So, I can see a city like Paris or New York or London saying to businesses, “The City is Your Office. Employees never have to be out of touch.” Also, once the city builds the infratructure, private companies will add services to it.”
Oh my.....You two need to immediately report to Constitution class. Government should not run private enterprises. It should not....because it cannot. It has been proven again, and again, and again.
There are so many reasons why internet should not be provided by the government, but we really don’t need to debate them. If you believe this, you are just wrong. It’s a foundational principle of freedom and limited government.
Die Hard: when I read your first post to the thread, I thought you were kidding, and really laughed. It seems you aren’t, unless you are extremely patient with your humor.
“It comes down to: How do you attract businesses to a city? Infrastructure is one way.”
Private, competitive and unregulated infrastructure.
One way not to attract business to a city; excessive regulation, high costs, and bureaucracy.
Paris’ initiative does not represent anything but bureaucracy.
“Back in the day of telegraph there were multiple companies setting up point to point wires for businesses. So you’d have a private line between the factory on the outskirts of town and the office in the center of the city. Even with the very basic technology, it was a mess.”
But.....they could communicate and do so cost-effectively, until something better came along.
Did government provide telegraphy services? No.
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