We could start by pulling the non-profit hospital systems of our country out of the strange middle-space they currently occupy b/t private and public. We don’t have to cut any ties of private ownership, snip away any connections to stock markets or shareholders. Something like 65% of our hospitals are non-profit across the country, benefiting each year from tax exemptions that are somewhere in the ballpark of 28billion dollars. The administrative class that operates these systems has worked over the last 25 years to consolidate all of our once community-based hospitals under the umbrella of a handful of management companies that ALSO take the tax exemption of non-profits. Consolidation has led to all sorts of monopolistic and monopsonistic practices that drive down the quality and drive up the costs of parient care. These C- suite execs make millions and millions and millions for operating what is ostensibly a public system with no private ownership structure, as though it is a totally private system. So start there. It’s ripe for conversion.
Regarding the Kroger comment, I think it's worthwhile presenting and discussing ideas like that that are out of the mainstream. I just had a conversation with someone where they and their friends suggested creating a new "anti-gouging" law to enforce against companies like grocery stores, but then they got stuck in the nitty gritty details of "wait, but you'd have to make it really specific and well-defined so it wouldn't harm businesses acting in good faith, or who actually are affected by inflation, etc.". The conversation quickly got derailed by the difficulty of adding more regulation and I think that's somewhat indicative of moderate liberal thinking.
Regulation isn't the only solution! Or even the best solution in some cases. There are already anti-trust laws that if enforced would prevent the market consolidation we see. We could use them to undo the consolidation that was illegally allowed to happen. Companies use their monopoly power to raise prices. And there are already anti-collusion laws as well if separate companies coordinate to raise prices. But I think a lot of people get stuck on the mechanism of "if there's a problem, we need to pass a new law to stop it".
None of this is to argue with your points. I agree there is huge room for public ownership or cooperative ownership models across the US. There are so many good ideas that aren't being discussed as broadly as they need to be.
Cooperatives need to stay small, so I doubt whether it's a model that would work "across the US". Northern Italian cheese cooperatives were reamalgamated into much larger cooperatives a few years ago and the whole cooperative dynamic was lost in a push for "industrialisation". As a legal form, it is wonderful, but only on a small scale. My bank is a cooperative. It's small enough to fail, but won't because it has very conservative investment policies. It's there for me, not for it.
Cooperatives aren't the only form of employee/worker ownership available. In the United States most employee-owned companies are ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans), in which the owner of the firm is a trust.
The trust is a fiduciary of the employees and votes for the benefit of the employees. There are currently 6,533 ESOPS with $2.1 trillion in assets. That is, there are 6,533 employee-owned firms, with 10.7 million current employees, called members, and about 4.7 million retired persons who are still being paid out the value of their shares or persons who have left the firm and are being paid the value of their shares over time.
This form of employee ownership has a problem because successful ESOP firms become targets of acquisition by larger firms. This means the ESOP trust as a fiduciary MUST entertain any offer that would benefit the employees. In the short term it's good for the employees who are bought out with a significant gain in the value of their shares, but in the long term it reduces the number of employee-owned firms. New Belgium Brewing is a recent example of that. There are still other big consumer product brands that are in niche markets and probably not targets, for now. (King Arthur Baking, Bob's Red Mill, Equal Exchange [coffee, tea, and chocolate], Clif Bar is partly-owned by an ESOP,
A better model is an Employee Ownership Trust whose purpose is broader than an ESOP (which in US law is regulated as a retirement plan under ERISA).
A firmed owned by an EOT is less likely to be sold to another firm. EOTs are relatively rare in the U.S.
There is no reason besides lack of imagination we couldn't incentivize broader employee ownership through the tax code or other laws.
As Nolan says above, once upon a time a national pension system (Social Security) was unimaginable and outside the bounds of acceptability. But now we all take it for granted (unless you're a Republican officeholder, neoliberal Democrat officeholder, or Wall Street vampire).
This doesn't kill the profit motive because even employee-owned firms are capitalist firms that must make some profit to survive. But imagine a United States were, let's be crazy here, 33% of all workers were either worker-cooperative members or ESOP members. Is that a 33% socialist economy? After all, those workers would be owners of means of production.
Even if it weren't public ownership, the political economy—and the culture—of that United States would be so different from ours that it's hard to imagine.
But I agree with Nolan that public ownership of stuff everyone needs is the best solution.
I'll definitely do some deeper reading to learn more about ESOPs, but my initial reaction is skepticism. I'm not sure how ESOPs as a form of public ownership square with the fact that 93% of stocks are owned by the top 10% wealthiest individuals (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-ownership-wealthiest-americans-one-percent-record-high-economy-2024-1). My overall view is that the stock market is not the best way to encourage cooperative ownership as the value of stocks is often determined by stock buybacks and other market manipulations by the wealthy to benefit themselves. Why not have workers share in the profit directly, rather than in a way that allows them to be bought out, or forced to sell their shares in times of need?
We latched onto "co-ops" just because Sean happened to mention them en passant. Thank you for your further insight here.
My own views accord very much with yours and the author's. I could be honest and say it's because the neoliberal experiment succeeded and I failed, because my soul wouldn't follow the money. Or I could be ideological and proclaim Marx right, even if his implementation was wrong. Or I could be practical and default to the position that nothing is ever broke enough to need to fix it.
I have recently been involved in a project on the Republic of Haiti, which of all the nations in the world, aside from the continent of Antarctica, presents the cleanest of slates on which to inscribe new history. A country that has failed in every form of government known to mankind, except that which is to be found 52 miles away on the next island over. Haiti is broken enough to want to fix it. When will the US be that broken?
What about Mondragon in Spain? Also I think there's a pretty big tomato processing plant in the US the Harvard Business Review did a case study on. But my impression is Mondragon might be one of the largest and most complex cooperatives
I don't know them, sorry. What makes cooperatives special - legally - is that they need to have three or more owners, unlike companies, which need to have two. That's basically it apart from accounting requirements. But, socially, they're a world apart. They engender a sense of belonging. It's less how the cooperative operates vis-à-vis its suppliers and customers as a business and far more how it and its members interact. In a large corporation, you know that HR is full of sh**. In a cooperative you really want to believe they aren't, and generally you're right.
Unfortunately, antitrust action requires going through the courts, which generates a lot of costs for the government (given the current state of antitrust law/practice) and not a ton of success given the disposition of judges. That’s for stopping mergers; unwinding them will be even harder.
I 100% see your points. The FTC is making some progress on that front, and I think we could push things to a tipping point where CEOs are afraid to start mergers again knowing that they would be found illegal, and at that point enforcement would be less costly to the government. It's just one of many areas to push for change though.
Fucking Reagan ruined that beautiful model of higher education when he was governor. I benefited just before things got really expensive after he was president.
In the dystopian novel 'Jennifer Government,' police forces, fire departments, and ambulances (and just about everything else) are privatized, with predictably miserable results. A good read.
In the book Lipstick Jihad, the author talks about EMS services in Iran. There, they are incentivized to go to certain hospitals over others based on reimbursement. Suffice to say, that's uh bad.
How about land? Since the public has no place to go without land, it should be obvious that land is not only a public good, but a public necessity. Let's get some Georgism goin' here.
THIS. The constant bleating about deficits and the “hard choices” we supposedly have to make (cutting social security, medical access, etc.) is all a smokescreen designed to keep you from noticing that the original source of all capital — land — has been completely taken off the table as a source of wealth for a better community. I’m not a single-taxer, but a strong tax shift in the Georgist direction is long overdue, whether you are a capitalist, socialist, or pragmatist, and whether you care more for social justice, environmental justice or simple want things to work better. We adopted income taxes during the Civil War and the wealthy have always fought them, but they permit them because they basically don’t pay much of them, their wealth being capital gains which are insanely lightly taxed. But we always should have gone in the Georgist direction with land value taxes, and if Lincoln had gone that route, we’d probably be a country where we considered it natural to tax the privatization of the commons and absurd to tax the proceeds of productive work.
Lincoln worked for the railroads, the biggest land grabbers in the country at least to that date. And of course he was assassinated 14 years before Henry George's seminal work, "Progress and Poverty" was published. Thanks, John, for chiming in on this. (BTW, I care a great deal about social justice, environmental justice AND also definitely want things to work better... economic justice is essential to all of those.)
You'll only make progress when you can propose these things without the blanket socialism/communism charges shutting you down. People have to get over those words.
I found the story of the "langars" of the Sikh community, particularly in Amristsar itself, inspiring. Free food, around the clock 7x24. And they are a poor, poor country but they give out free food, because fundamentally, really basic beans & bread meals are barely a buck a piece.
My favorite rhetorical tactic is to point out the socialism we already have. The US Army is socialist. If private is always better than public, let's privatize the army. Very quickly most people will back away from that. I especially enjoy that one with fellow veterans. If you honestly lived the creed that you would never leave a fallen comrade, never leave anyone behind as a soldier, why won't you live that as a civilian citizen?
I ask them if they would trust a privatized fire department. If they like the outdoors I ask them if they think a non-socialist, privatized national park system would be better. Do they honestly think a privatized national park system would only charge $80 annually for a pass?
We already have socialism, but it's arbitrarily applied, as Nolan points out. I disagree with you that "people have to get over those words." I think WE have to re-frame those words and help others realize we already have socialism for some things, and they like it that way.
I’ve used similar arguments, except I get more brutal. “It’s not really the ‘socialist’ Army, it’s really the ‘communist’ Army, in the field, because they live communally, like the original Spartan army: sleep in barracks, eat in mess halls, no private dwellings.
From each according to his abilities - including asking for your life - and to each, according to his needs, so that a 21-year-old might be handed a $21M helicopter, if that’s his Army need.
I hadn’t thought of us civilians just applying “leave nobody behind” to all civilians - but that’s what it is. Thanks for the thought.
"A standard retort against government-run industries is that they will be less efficient than privately owned industries, provide worse service, produce a miserable experience for you, the consumer. Bullshit."
I think private health insurance very much proves this contention to be absolute bullshit. And, as someone who works in healthcare (and specifically in emergency/critical care med) I can tell you there's a huge difference in quality between volunteer and fully-funded public EMS systems. I can see only good coming from paying medics in the outlying rural counties, rather than relying on volunteers.
As for your broader point - there was a recent headline in our local paper about the Harris economic plans, such as they are. All the comments were negative, but one in particular stood out to me - "you can't spend your way to prosperity." Except yes, you absolutely can - numerous outcome studies of giving people cash (including the expanded child tax credit) prove this to be the case. Ditto housing the homeless in actual homes and not jail cells or shelters. Ditto all the fucking money our governments dump into private companies!
As for whether public spending/ownership "is communism" or whatever, I think the answer should be "I don't really care what 'ism' this is, if it delivers better outcomes to more people." Or, more simply, "so what?"
Oh and ALSO I wish you were gonna be in Gainesville during the weekend of October 25th. That's when Fest happens, and I think you would get quite an audience for your book signing there.
I would except I don't live in Gainesville...as a general rule I try to stay out of Florida. But Fest is a great weekend that makes Florida almost bearable.
But if you happen to be North Carolina I'd be happy to spread the word.
Every country should invest in the health, education and well-being of its citizens. That's how you make a strong, thriving country. And that means investing in a robust public social safety net.
I argue that we should include much of our media -- especially local journalism and broadband services -- under this category as well. They should be taken out of the market altogether: https://lpeproject.org/blog/taking-media-out-of-the-market/
Absolutely right! Excellent article! I remember using British Rail in the 60s. It was an excellent, efficient service; among the best train services in the world. Then Thatcher privatized it, selling it off to private bidders. Now it's absurdly expensive and inefficient, and disjoined and unresponsive to the consumers. Far too much money went into dividends for shareholders and big takings by the executives. Even worse was the privatization of sewage treatment and water supply. The private companies that took over a perfectly functioning, coordinated, nationally regulated public system have failed in every respect - other than lining their pockets - they are massively in debt, the rivers are now polluted with sewage, and the service is appalling. Public ownership under decent public regulation, and scrutiny, is always more efficient, cheaper, and better for the public.
The heterodox economist Steve Keen has a wonderful way of making this point. In different talks and interviews I've heard him say he wishes he could bring Thatcher back to life and take her on a train ride in Britain today and a train ride on the Continent (ICE, TGV, or AVE). He'd ask her, "Which one is the British one?" Of course she'd say it was ICE, TGV, or AVE because only privatization could produce such advanced service and she'd say National Rail was obviously the shitty socialist one.
We have privatised human waste treatment in Belgium and it works astonishingly efficiently, but it is a much smaller place than the UK. Water sampling is done every week, if not every several days, and any failures are followed up on immediately with fines. The entire ethos is "there is no acceptable standard below excellence." The likes of Thames Water do not exist here, which shows that it can be done properly, if the industry is properly regulated.
I’ve been heard to say that you really don’t want to live in a pure market system or a pure socialist one, and that it’s not that hard to know where to draw the line: Having served in the military, what I came up with was that we should have socialism of the essentials, and capitalism for everything else. They make sure you have adequate housing, education/training, medical care, and every hot meals with awesome baked goods every six hours around the clock — as a result of this basic security for your Maslow pyramid needs, your mind is freed up to worry about your job. The amount of lost intelligence and creativity in America because people are stressed about next meal/next rent/next medical bill is truly staggering.
But they don’t provide everything. Capitalism is a power tool — used properly with with adequate guardrails and attention to safety, it’s a highly productive way to work — it really does fit well with certain aspects of human nature and creativity. So long as it’s not how you provide the essentials, it’s worth using.
I say this all the time to fellow veterans. If as a soldier I would never leave a fallen comrade and always place others before me (place the mission first), then why won't I do that as a civilian citizen?
(I tell people who were never on active duty to begin understanding veterans you must begin by understanding that the highest values are reliability and selflessness. Selfless and reliable people are talked about admiringly for years after they leave a unit. Selfish and self-centered shitbags are denigrated endlessly.)
So now the question is defining what are the essentials? I say electricity (energy in general), water, mass transportation (buses and trains), healthcare, and education are essentials. And now Nolan has convinced food is too. Hell yeah the US government should just buy Kroger's and Safeway and take food away from the profit motive.
"For one thing, private companies do an excellent job of providing a miserable experience for the highest possible price already." Cory Doctorow's coinage encapsulates this perfectly: Enshittification.
Kroger is a publicly traded private company 8% owned by Berkshire Hathaway. It is unionized and has national reach and scale.
Albertsons has almost as much geographic reach (including subsidiaries like Safeway, also unionized) and is owned by PE.
It would be easier to buy the PE company
as all they care about is $.
Even if the state overpays (tax the PE guys and recover a big chunk of the cost:-), a well run non-profit citizen-oriented grocery operation of scale would put pressure on all the others to provide better pricing.
Remember, though, that the grocery business is historically a low-margin business.
(Walmart is by far the largest grocery chain in the U.S.)
And really the most important one would be simply the first move. The first privately controlled service going to the public. And once people realize that the world didn't end just because a bunch of rich motherfuckers didn't get to get richer off of our suffering, The next one will be even easier. It's really more about breaking the ice at this point than anything else. And something that we could learn from for each new venture into moving the private sector into the public sector. Something I had thought of several years ago was that the government shouldn't do any contracting with any companies or corporations that are traded on the stock market. And incentive structure for war and imprisoning people is just a really bad fucking idea. Counterintuitively, those kinds of services should be Prohibitively expensive. It should have to hurt to pay for those things, so that we aren't hell-bent on using them
"A standard retort against government-run industries is that they will be less efficient than privately owned industries, provide worse service, produce a miserable experience for you, the consumer."
Another standard retort, funnily enough, is that, say, a government-run grocery chain or consumer-oriented bank will drive the privately-owned competition out of business due to not having to turn a profit - and that this would be unfair to the poor innocent business-people running the competition. How this argument coexists with the one about inefficiency (and it often does) is something I haven't quite been able to figure out. It's a bit like the one about immigrants being lazy and also taking all the jobs.
We could start by pulling the non-profit hospital systems of our country out of the strange middle-space they currently occupy b/t private and public. We don’t have to cut any ties of private ownership, snip away any connections to stock markets or shareholders. Something like 65% of our hospitals are non-profit across the country, benefiting each year from tax exemptions that are somewhere in the ballpark of 28billion dollars. The administrative class that operates these systems has worked over the last 25 years to consolidate all of our once community-based hospitals under the umbrella of a handful of management companies that ALSO take the tax exemption of non-profits. Consolidation has led to all sorts of monopolistic and monopsonistic practices that drive down the quality and drive up the costs of parient care. These C- suite execs make millions and millions and millions for operating what is ostensibly a public system with no private ownership structure, as though it is a totally private system. So start there. It’s ripe for conversion.
Preach!
Regarding the Kroger comment, I think it's worthwhile presenting and discussing ideas like that that are out of the mainstream. I just had a conversation with someone where they and their friends suggested creating a new "anti-gouging" law to enforce against companies like grocery stores, but then they got stuck in the nitty gritty details of "wait, but you'd have to make it really specific and well-defined so it wouldn't harm businesses acting in good faith, or who actually are affected by inflation, etc.". The conversation quickly got derailed by the difficulty of adding more regulation and I think that's somewhat indicative of moderate liberal thinking.
Regulation isn't the only solution! Or even the best solution in some cases. There are already anti-trust laws that if enforced would prevent the market consolidation we see. We could use them to undo the consolidation that was illegally allowed to happen. Companies use their monopoly power to raise prices. And there are already anti-collusion laws as well if separate companies coordinate to raise prices. But I think a lot of people get stuck on the mechanism of "if there's a problem, we need to pass a new law to stop it".
None of this is to argue with your points. I agree there is huge room for public ownership or cooperative ownership models across the US. There are so many good ideas that aren't being discussed as broadly as they need to be.
Cooperatives need to stay small, so I doubt whether it's a model that would work "across the US". Northern Italian cheese cooperatives were reamalgamated into much larger cooperatives a few years ago and the whole cooperative dynamic was lost in a push for "industrialisation". As a legal form, it is wonderful, but only on a small scale. My bank is a cooperative. It's small enough to fail, but won't because it has very conservative investment policies. It's there for me, not for it.
Cooperatives aren't the only form of employee/worker ownership available. In the United States most employee-owned companies are ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans), in which the owner of the firm is a trust.
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-by-the-numbers#1
The trust is a fiduciary of the employees and votes for the benefit of the employees. There are currently 6,533 ESOPS with $2.1 trillion in assets. That is, there are 6,533 employee-owned firms, with 10.7 million current employees, called members, and about 4.7 million retired persons who are still being paid out the value of their shares or persons who have left the firm and are being paid the value of their shares over time.
This form of employee ownership has a problem because successful ESOP firms become targets of acquisition by larger firms. This means the ESOP trust as a fiduciary MUST entertain any offer that would benefit the employees. In the short term it's good for the employees who are bought out with a significant gain in the value of their shares, but in the long term it reduces the number of employee-owned firms. New Belgium Brewing is a recent example of that. There are still other big consumer product brands that are in niche markets and probably not targets, for now. (King Arthur Baking, Bob's Red Mill, Equal Exchange [coffee, tea, and chocolate], Clif Bar is partly-owned by an ESOP,
A better model is an Employee Ownership Trust whose purpose is broader than an ESOP (which in US law is regulated as a retirement plan under ERISA).
A firmed owned by an EOT is less likely to be sold to another firm. EOTs are relatively rare in the U.S.
https://www.nceo.org/article/introduction-employee-ownership-trusts
There is no reason besides lack of imagination we couldn't incentivize broader employee ownership through the tax code or other laws.
As Nolan says above, once upon a time a national pension system (Social Security) was unimaginable and outside the bounds of acceptability. But now we all take it for granted (unless you're a Republican officeholder, neoliberal Democrat officeholder, or Wall Street vampire).
This doesn't kill the profit motive because even employee-owned firms are capitalist firms that must make some profit to survive. But imagine a United States were, let's be crazy here, 33% of all workers were either worker-cooperative members or ESOP members. Is that a 33% socialist economy? After all, those workers would be owners of means of production.
Even if it weren't public ownership, the political economy—and the culture—of that United States would be so different from ours that it's hard to imagine.
But I agree with Nolan that public ownership of stuff everyone needs is the best solution.
I'll definitely do some deeper reading to learn more about ESOPs, but my initial reaction is skepticism. I'm not sure how ESOPs as a form of public ownership square with the fact that 93% of stocks are owned by the top 10% wealthiest individuals (https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-ownership-wealthiest-americans-one-percent-record-high-economy-2024-1). My overall view is that the stock market is not the best way to encourage cooperative ownership as the value of stocks is often determined by stock buybacks and other market manipulations by the wealthy to benefit themselves. Why not have workers share in the profit directly, rather than in a way that allows them to be bought out, or forced to sell their shares in times of need?
We latched onto "co-ops" just because Sean happened to mention them en passant. Thank you for your further insight here.
My own views accord very much with yours and the author's. I could be honest and say it's because the neoliberal experiment succeeded and I failed, because my soul wouldn't follow the money. Or I could be ideological and proclaim Marx right, even if his implementation was wrong. Or I could be practical and default to the position that nothing is ever broke enough to need to fix it.
I have recently been involved in a project on the Republic of Haiti, which of all the nations in the world, aside from the continent of Antarctica, presents the cleanest of slates on which to inscribe new history. A country that has failed in every form of government known to mankind, except that which is to be found 52 miles away on the next island over. Haiti is broken enough to want to fix it. When will the US be that broken?
Also there's a case to be made that smaller and more decentralized could be better in many ways
What about Mondragon in Spain? Also I think there's a pretty big tomato processing plant in the US the Harvard Business Review did a case study on. But my impression is Mondragon might be one of the largest and most complex cooperatives
I don't know them, sorry. What makes cooperatives special - legally - is that they need to have three or more owners, unlike companies, which need to have two. That's basically it apart from accounting requirements. But, socially, they're a world apart. They engender a sense of belonging. It's less how the cooperative operates vis-à-vis its suppliers and customers as a business and far more how it and its members interact. In a large corporation, you know that HR is full of sh**. In a cooperative you really want to believe they aren't, and generally you're right.
Unfortunately, antitrust action requires going through the courts, which generates a lot of costs for the government (given the current state of antitrust law/practice) and not a ton of success given the disposition of judges. That’s for stopping mergers; unwinding them will be even harder.
I 100% see your points. The FTC is making some progress on that front, and I think we could push things to a tipping point where CEOs are afraid to start mergers again knowing that they would be found illegal, and at that point enforcement would be less costly to the government. It's just one of many areas to push for change though.
Also higher education. Remember the California Masterplan from 1960? Free public higher ed, community colleges through the USC and UC systems. https://ahed.assembly.ca.gov/sites/ahed.assembly.ca.gov/files/hearings/master%20plan.pdf
Today part of the vision of Higher Ed Labor United at higheredlaborunited.org
Fucking Reagan ruined that beautiful model of higher education when he was governor. I benefited just before things got really expensive after he was president.
In the dystopian novel 'Jennifer Government,' police forces, fire departments, and ambulances (and just about everything else) are privatized, with predictably miserable results. A good read.
Similiar to The Parable of the Sower
In the book Lipstick Jihad, the author talks about EMS services in Iran. There, they are incentivized to go to certain hospitals over others based on reimbursement. Suffice to say, that's uh bad.
How about land? Since the public has no place to go without land, it should be obvious that land is not only a public good, but a public necessity. Let's get some Georgism goin' here.
THIS. The constant bleating about deficits and the “hard choices” we supposedly have to make (cutting social security, medical access, etc.) is all a smokescreen designed to keep you from noticing that the original source of all capital — land — has been completely taken off the table as a source of wealth for a better community. I’m not a single-taxer, but a strong tax shift in the Georgist direction is long overdue, whether you are a capitalist, socialist, or pragmatist, and whether you care more for social justice, environmental justice or simple want things to work better. We adopted income taxes during the Civil War and the wealthy have always fought them, but they permit them because they basically don’t pay much of them, their wealth being capital gains which are insanely lightly taxed. But we always should have gone in the Georgist direction with land value taxes, and if Lincoln had gone that route, we’d probably be a country where we considered it natural to tax the privatization of the commons and absurd to tax the proceeds of productive work.
Lincoln worked for the railroads, the biggest land grabbers in the country at least to that date. And of course he was assassinated 14 years before Henry George's seminal work, "Progress and Poverty" was published. Thanks, John, for chiming in on this. (BTW, I care a great deal about social justice, environmental justice AND also definitely want things to work better... economic justice is essential to all of those.)
You'll only make progress when you can propose these things without the blanket socialism/communism charges shutting you down. People have to get over those words.
I found the story of the "langars" of the Sikh community, particularly in Amristsar itself, inspiring. Free food, around the clock 7x24. And they are a poor, poor country but they give out free food, because fundamentally, really basic beans & bread meals are barely a buck a piece.
My favorite rhetorical tactic is to point out the socialism we already have. The US Army is socialist. If private is always better than public, let's privatize the army. Very quickly most people will back away from that. I especially enjoy that one with fellow veterans. If you honestly lived the creed that you would never leave a fallen comrade, never leave anyone behind as a soldier, why won't you live that as a civilian citizen?
I ask them if they would trust a privatized fire department. If they like the outdoors I ask them if they think a non-socialist, privatized national park system would be better. Do they honestly think a privatized national park system would only charge $80 annually for a pass?
We already have socialism, but it's arbitrarily applied, as Nolan points out. I disagree with you that "people have to get over those words." I think WE have to re-frame those words and help others realize we already have socialism for some things, and they like it that way.
I’ve used similar arguments, except I get more brutal. “It’s not really the ‘socialist’ Army, it’s really the ‘communist’ Army, in the field, because they live communally, like the original Spartan army: sleep in barracks, eat in mess halls, no private dwellings.
From each according to his abilities - including asking for your life - and to each, according to his needs, so that a 21-year-old might be handed a $21M helicopter, if that’s his Army need.
I hadn’t thought of us civilians just applying “leave nobody behind” to all civilians - but that’s what it is. Thanks for the thought.
"A standard retort against government-run industries is that they will be less efficient than privately owned industries, provide worse service, produce a miserable experience for you, the consumer. Bullshit."
I think private health insurance very much proves this contention to be absolute bullshit. And, as someone who works in healthcare (and specifically in emergency/critical care med) I can tell you there's a huge difference in quality between volunteer and fully-funded public EMS systems. I can see only good coming from paying medics in the outlying rural counties, rather than relying on volunteers.
As for your broader point - there was a recent headline in our local paper about the Harris economic plans, such as they are. All the comments were negative, but one in particular stood out to me - "you can't spend your way to prosperity." Except yes, you absolutely can - numerous outcome studies of giving people cash (including the expanded child tax credit) prove this to be the case. Ditto housing the homeless in actual homes and not jail cells or shelters. Ditto all the fucking money our governments dump into private companies!
As for whether public spending/ownership "is communism" or whatever, I think the answer should be "I don't really care what 'ism' this is, if it delivers better outcomes to more people." Or, more simply, "so what?"
Oh and ALSO I wish you were gonna be in Gainesville during the weekend of October 25th. That's when Fest happens, and I think you would get quite an audience for your book signing there.
Well if you bring all your friends we will get a decent crowd September 26 anyhow.
I would except I don't live in Gainesville...as a general rule I try to stay out of Florida. But Fest is a great weekend that makes Florida almost bearable.
But if you happen to be North Carolina I'd be happy to spread the word.
I'll be there too! Can't wait for FEST. And yes, wish we had author events there.
Something to suggest to the organizers...?
Every country should invest in the health, education and well-being of its citizens. That's how you make a strong, thriving country. And that means investing in a robust public social safety net.
I argue that we should include much of our media -- especially local journalism and broadband services -- under this category as well. They should be taken out of the market altogether: https://lpeproject.org/blog/taking-media-out-of-the-market/
This might interest you.
https://ilsr.org/broadband/
Thanks -- very familiar with ILSR and their great work!
Absolutely right! Excellent article! I remember using British Rail in the 60s. It was an excellent, efficient service; among the best train services in the world. Then Thatcher privatized it, selling it off to private bidders. Now it's absurdly expensive and inefficient, and disjoined and unresponsive to the consumers. Far too much money went into dividends for shareholders and big takings by the executives. Even worse was the privatization of sewage treatment and water supply. The private companies that took over a perfectly functioning, coordinated, nationally regulated public system have failed in every respect - other than lining their pockets - they are massively in debt, the rivers are now polluted with sewage, and the service is appalling. Public ownership under decent public regulation, and scrutiny, is always more efficient, cheaper, and better for the public.
The heterodox economist Steve Keen has a wonderful way of making this point. In different talks and interviews I've heard him say he wishes he could bring Thatcher back to life and take her on a train ride in Britain today and a train ride on the Continent (ICE, TGV, or AVE). He'd ask her, "Which one is the British one?" Of course she'd say it was ICE, TGV, or AVE because only privatization could produce such advanced service and she'd say National Rail was obviously the shitty socialist one.
We have privatised human waste treatment in Belgium and it works astonishingly efficiently, but it is a much smaller place than the UK. Water sampling is done every week, if not every several days, and any failures are followed up on immediately with fines. The entire ethos is "there is no acceptable standard below excellence." The likes of Thames Water do not exist here, which shows that it can be done properly, if the industry is properly regulated.
I’ve been heard to say that you really don’t want to live in a pure market system or a pure socialist one, and that it’s not that hard to know where to draw the line: Having served in the military, what I came up with was that we should have socialism of the essentials, and capitalism for everything else. They make sure you have adequate housing, education/training, medical care, and every hot meals with awesome baked goods every six hours around the clock — as a result of this basic security for your Maslow pyramid needs, your mind is freed up to worry about your job. The amount of lost intelligence and creativity in America because people are stressed about next meal/next rent/next medical bill is truly staggering.
But they don’t provide everything. Capitalism is a power tool — used properly with with adequate guardrails and attention to safety, it’s a highly productive way to work — it really does fit well with certain aspects of human nature and creativity. So long as it’s not how you provide the essentials, it’s worth using.
I say this all the time to fellow veterans. If as a soldier I would never leave a fallen comrade and always place others before me (place the mission first), then why won't I do that as a civilian citizen?
(I tell people who were never on active duty to begin understanding veterans you must begin by understanding that the highest values are reliability and selflessness. Selfless and reliable people are talked about admiringly for years after they leave a unit. Selfish and self-centered shitbags are denigrated endlessly.)
So now the question is defining what are the essentials? I say electricity (energy in general), water, mass transportation (buses and trains), healthcare, and education are essentials. And now Nolan has convinced food is too. Hell yeah the US government should just buy Kroger's and Safeway and take food away from the profit motive.
"For one thing, private companies do an excellent job of providing a miserable experience for the highest possible price already." Cory Doctorow's coinage encapsulates this perfectly: Enshittification.
Kroger is a publicly traded private company 8% owned by Berkshire Hathaway. It is unionized and has national reach and scale.
Albertsons has almost as much geographic reach (including subsidiaries like Safeway, also unionized) and is owned by PE.
It would be easier to buy the PE company
as all they care about is $.
Even if the state overpays (tax the PE guys and recover a big chunk of the cost:-), a well run non-profit citizen-oriented grocery operation of scale would put pressure on all the others to provide better pricing.
Remember, though, that the grocery business is historically a low-margin business.
(Walmart is by far the largest grocery chain in the U.S.)
Your clarity is much appreciated.
And really the most important one would be simply the first move. The first privately controlled service going to the public. And once people realize that the world didn't end just because a bunch of rich motherfuckers didn't get to get richer off of our suffering, The next one will be even easier. It's really more about breaking the ice at this point than anything else. And something that we could learn from for each new venture into moving the private sector into the public sector. Something I had thought of several years ago was that the government shouldn't do any contracting with any companies or corporations that are traded on the stock market. And incentive structure for war and imprisoning people is just a really bad fucking idea. Counterintuitively, those kinds of services should be Prohibitively expensive. It should have to hurt to pay for those things, so that we aren't hell-bent on using them
"A standard retort against government-run industries is that they will be less efficient than privately owned industries, provide worse service, produce a miserable experience for you, the consumer."
Another standard retort, funnily enough, is that, say, a government-run grocery chain or consumer-oriented bank will drive the privately-owned competition out of business due to not having to turn a profit - and that this would be unfair to the poor innocent business-people running the competition. How this argument coexists with the one about inefficiency (and it often does) is something I haven't quite been able to figure out. It's a bit like the one about immigrants being lazy and also taking all the jobs.