The difference between a nationalised industry and a publically-offered industry is that the nationalised industry has a chance of properly dealing with externalities, treating workers properly, ensuring safe long-term functionality, and, y'know, prioritizing the service they're there to provide.
This situation is covered by the first, though I bet the things that are killing the insects are hurting us, too.
Yes, yes, the USSR was bad. If I allow you to define "nationalised industry" as "something bad the Soviets/CCP/Venezuelans did", then of course it's bad.
Contrast that to the concept of a Crown corporation in Canada, which "provide services required by the public that otherwise would not be economically viable as a private enterprise or that do not fit exactly within the scope of any ministry." [0] They can do things like "care about externalities" because they're not expected to make money, but they're still structured as corporations and therefore can have the usual trappings like middle management and competitive salaries and casual Fridays.
A famous example would be the Canadian National Railway, which was created by government fiat in 1918 as a response to a bunch of private railways in (less-developed) western Canada running out of government money to feed on and thereby going bankrupt. The diversity of the interests that it inherited allowed it to spin off all sorts of other beneficial Crown corporations recognized by every Canadian, like VIA Rail, Air Canada, and the CBC.
Of course, the privatization of Crown corporations is also a great way for right-wing governments to create minor budgetary surpluses to enthrall the plebes while handing over a captive "customer"-base to their already-wealthy friends, and since the 80s it's become a proud tradition. [1] Air Canada, Ontario Hydro, Petro-Canada...
> Contrast that to the concept of a Crown corporation in Canada
Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though, it is just an organization for providing government services and isn't any different than a typical department of education or post or government rails etc.
I'm sure most agree with you that there are areas best served by government run organizations. Crown corporation just operates in such areas, so it wouldn't change peoples views on what services a government should run at all.
>Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though, it is just an organization for providing government services and isn't any different than a typical department of education or post or government rails etc.
An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry? I also suggest you read the second link in the grandparent: Nova Chemicals, Yara Belle Plaine, PotashCorp, all the resource extraction corps in Saskatchewan...
Also, that's strictly wrong -- Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all, so long as the government chose to endow them to do so. Furthermore, some Crown corporations must deal with real physical externalities arising as a consequence of their operations, like Petro-Canada, which (before it was sold off for a song to already-rich people) extracted real physical oil in Alberta, and dealt with the real physical externalities in a much MUCH *MUCH* more accountable way.
> An oil extraction and distribution company isn't an industry?
No, they aren't manufacturing anything. Managing natural resources is a reasonable thing for a government to do.
> Crown corporations could operate in any sphere of business at all
But they aren't which is the point. Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would, so using them as an example doesn't work.
> Furthermore, some Crown corporations must deal with real physical externalities arising as a consequence of their operations, like Petro-Canada
There is no reason this couldn't just be done for private corporations via regulations. Politicians have that power today, why aren't they using it? And why do you think they would use it if ownership was different?
Apologies, I had updated my comment to list a few of the dozen-and-a-half industrial Crown corporations that Canadian governments have sold off to already-wealthy people. I'll continue: Victory Aircraft, Orion Bus Industries, Canadian Vickers, Canadair...
It's a historical fact that the government did operate industrial Crown corporations, and they operated them "better", as viewed from the embarrassingly non-fiduciary perspectives of the workers and the environment, which is the point.
>There is no reason this couldn't just be done for private corporations via regulations. Politicians have that power today, why aren't they using it? And why do you think they would use it if ownership was different?
There's several organizations between the legislature in which some regulation is made, and the actual group to be regulated, whereas a Crown corporation's mandate to report directly to the government, not to mention the absent necessity to cover bad things up until the quarterly earnings report drops, makes them more honest. The other kicker, of course, is that private corporations can just bribe I mean lobby the government for permission to do bad things. There's not really an incentive for Crown corporations to do that.
A Crown corp is not there to make ever-increasing amounts of money, they're there to provide a service. No amount of deployed regulation on a for-profit, privately-owned corporation can change its tendency to optimize for the former.
Victory aircraft was a WW2 wartime aircraft manufacturer, not sure how that is relevant for anything. Wartime economics is very different from peacetime economics.
Orion Bus Industries is and was always a private company. It was owner by a government entity for an extremely short period.
Canadian Vickers is a private company.
Canadair was a private company, then nationalized for a decade. Crown didn't do a good job leading this company so they sold it a decade later. This just solidifies my point, they can't run industries efficiently.
> There's not really an incentive for Crown corporations to do that. They're not there to make ever-increasing amounts of money, they're there to provide a service.
Right, they can work in service sectors where you provide a service to people. They can't do good work in an industry sector where the job is to produce goods. Government agencies are great at managing simple sectors, but they couldn't take over the entire private sector. If they could then they would already have done that in many areas of the world and those would thrive. But anyone who tried quickly reversed it as it didn't work out.
"Evidence"? You said there aren't any industrial Crown corporations. In fact, you said that
>>>Crown corporation in Canada isn't running any industries though
and
>>Just because they could do something in theory doesn't mean that they would do a good job if they did. There is no evidence that they would, so using them as an example doesn't work.
But I listed a whole bunch of former industrial Crown corporations. Just because you don't like the idea that your baseless assertions were proven wrong by the facts doesn't detract from their facticity.
Canadian Vickers isn't a private company, they don't exist. When they did exist, they were heavily subsidized by the government and then nationalised into Canadair, which then privatized after the war and got thrown around as a subsidiary of various aerospace corps until '76 when the government bought it from General Dynamics. Then it actually did quite well until the Challenger business jet, then the Mulroney government -- one of those right-wing, fast-buck governments I mentioned earlier -- sold it in '86. And that's a great example, because that's just a straight-up loss. If a private company makes a crazily-bad investment, it's going to go under and get bought for pennies on the dollar by another private company. A Crown corporation, theoretically, can take less "sensible" business risks without that fear, because of government support. Unless the government decides it's not worth it and sells it for pennies on the dollar by another private company.
>Crown didn't do a good job leading this company so they sold it a decade later. This just solidifies my point, they can't run industries efficiently.
The "Crown" doesn't "lead" a Crown corporation. They don't make business decisions for them, they just provide a mandate (in this case, "design aircraft in Canada"), a financial backstop, and, yes, allow much more efficient internal meddling than normal regulatory schemes if need be.
To be honest, I don't think you really know what you're talking about. Your assertions are mostly false, and the suggestion that my argument is leading up to the idea that "government agencies" could "take over the entire private sector" is absolutely bonkers. Again, I suggest you go read up on what, exactly, a Crown corporation is and does. You're clearly under a number of incredible misapprehensions.
How about the middle ground, where the capitalists try to be good citizens and patriotically do not attempt to poison us all for profit, while building escape bunkers in New Zealand, once we are all f---ed back home.
Ok, big ask, I know. How about this - they stop gutting the government to a point where any sort of reasonable regulation and oversight is essentially absent. Let's be honest for once about what "small government" stands for.
> the solution to these types of problems are incompatible with capitalism as we practice it today.
It isn't, regulations to price in externalities is a cornerstone of modern capitalism as practiced everywhere in the west. If your government isn't doing its job then you shouldn't blame capital, you should blame your government, your voters or the system you use to count votes and elect officials.
If companies can just buy politicians then the problem lies with your democracy and not with those companies.
That's too bad. "Corporations are people", my friend, but they can also pump unlimited amounts of money into politics, creating their own laws. Let's not just call out "the government". They are the government. And, no, it's not tinfoil stuff, we know what's going on.
Politicians taking bribes from companies for creating laws is an example of politicians using their power to enrich themselves. Such politicians will use their power to enrich themselves regardless of what system you use, making such people run the entire economy would guarantee a disaster.
What you need is a stronger separation of capital and state.
There is no separation of capital and state in the United States anymore. It's just more "gentle". What we have is "broken capitalism".
We have a system where government figures trade as if they were teenagers on Robinhood, then disappearing through revolving doors to work for the companies they were supposed to "regulate", we have CEOs running companies into the ground while walking away with riches. This ain't capitalism. It's something.
Historically, the capitalist countries have been much less-polluted ('cleaner') and more environmentally friendly in general than the communist countries. With respect to 'socialist' countries, the correlations depend on exactly how you define socialism, and which countries you include/exclude.
The alternative to 'capitalism as we see it today' is not socialism. It's capitalism without regulatory capture and functional regulatory bodies that have teeth and use them.
Totally and completely false. The UK in 1930 was much more polluted than the USSR and China at that time. Making that argument today is possible if you ignore moving practically all manufacturing to a country that happens to be communist. There would be far less pollution in China if they weren't making all of our stuff. It's actually a good example of how unchecked capitalism is always looking for new ways to externalize costs, regardless of the consequences for whoever is left holding the bag.
Also, any country that builds infrastructure with taxes and regulates industry is socialist, including the US. The difference is usually that "capitalist" countries have safety net for corporations and the wealthy, while "socialist" countries have safety nets for everyone.
>The UK in 1930 was much more polluted than the USSR and China at that time.
And how industrialized were the USSR and China in 1930?
When a larger part of your economy is agrarian you're going to be incapable of polluting the shit out of everything to the same extent as more industrialized nations.
Well, China wasn't communist in 1930; that aside, I think it's tough to get an accurate idea of one specific time in the past, as such I think we're better off trying to understand the general situation over the situation over a longer-term in the USSR. Here is a quote from a self-professed socialist on a socialist website about the environmental situation there:
>"On this basis, let me agree with Adam that the damage done to the environment by the Soviet regime and its successor doesn’t remotely bear comparison with that in the West. It was, and remains, catastrophically worse. Particular countries elsewhere, especially in the developing world, have suffered one or another ecological disaster, sometimes of mind-bending dimensions. The USSR managed something in just about every sector of heavy industry to match the worst of them."
I think there’s enough contradictory information here to make clear ideological statements like that indefensible. The late USSR was far dirtier than America of the same period, yes, but neither can hold a candle to pre-EPA America or late industrial revolution England. Heck, London had a coal smoke smog in 1952 that killed 10-12K people in a week.
Regardless, I find this discussion to be an unwelcome diversion. The USSR is dead, and even most communists don’t want that specific state back. The reality is that today in America we regularly let companies privatize their profits and shift their costs onto all of society. We don’t need to nationalize industry to fix that, and as you correctly point out that might not be sufficient, but we do need to regulate this.
North Korea and Cuba have been disasters, and I think you're wrong about the USSR being cleaner than pre-EPA USA. China has been a mess throughout its self-professed communist history as well; you may dispute its degree of communism, but it certainly has more nationalized industries (of the sort proposed in parent comments) than the USA or any other 'capitalist' country.
I see you’re more interested in hashing out the communism vs. capitalism thing. I am not. Frankly it’s the internet’s most overwrought and under productive argument.
All I want to see is industries pay according to the impact that they have on society. This isn’t an inherently socialistic idea, but it would require a change in the way that we currently conceive of capitalism[0].
0 - Economists generally think that removing these externalities are good for the market. But this runs contrary to the anti-regulation attitude currently in vogue.
>"I see you’re more interested in hashing out the communism vs. capitalism thing."
No, I just think that most of your previous post was wrong.
edit: I see that you added to your post:
>"0 - Economists generally think that removing these externalities are good for the market. But this runs contrary to the anti-regulation attitude currently in vogue. "
Where have regulations decreased over the medium to long-term (5+ years)? I can't think of any (stable) country which has acted in an anti-regulatory way; do you have any specific examples?
> Where have regulations decreased over the medium to long-term (5+ years)? I can't think of any (stable) country which has acted in an anti-regulatory way; do you have any specific examples?
This is genuinely quite baffling to me. Ignoring the fact that de-regulation has been an explicit plank of the GOP for my entire life, the US deregulated a ton of stuff since the Reagan era. Airlines, trucking, labor, and the financial industry all saw significant cuts to their regulatory rules. Anti-trust laws have been re-interpreted to be less aggressive[0] leading to more mergers, and regulation of various services have been weakened[1]. Environmental regulations have been a bit of a back-and-forth with executive orders changing things often, but at the state level de-regulation and willful non-enforcement is the norm in some areas. Texas is generally the go-to here, with willful non-enforcement of EPA rules around fracking and the (disastrous) deregulation of the energy market. Trump in particular made industrial de-regulation a goal, and tried to de-regulate a ton of stuff and lock out his successors from changing the rules back.
The UK is now finally starting up their deregulatory processes again, now that they're no longer restrained by the EU. They've been greenlighting new pesticides for use, eliminating EU rules around used plastic exports, and allowing private water companies to dump their untreated sewage into the ocean. Personally I'd keep my eye on them the most for de-regulation, because their anti-regulation party has effectively no electable opposition, leaving them entirely without political restraint. Although given the current status of their import woes, I think they might end up not being sufficiently stable for your requirements.
0 - Anti-trust used to be about whether or not a company was "anti-competitive". The new rules determine whether or not a monopoly reduces consumer prices. Whether or not this is good or not, this is effectively a deregulation.
1 - I'm specifically thinking of the end of the fairness doctrine and the deregulation of ISPs.
I would agree that many specific regulations in the USA have been reduced/eliminated, but overall regulations have steadily increased throughout the last 90+ years. You may be able to pick out one year that they decreased overall (though I can't), but I doubt you can find a 5-year period over which they've decreased (by any measure).
I gave tons of examples and an entire decade with bipartisan deregulation as the norm. It seems that you're ignoring what I actually wrote, all while demanding more evidence I already gave and offering none of your own. I'm forced to conclude that you're not really acting in good faith, and that there's no point in continuing.
You're citing what Congress said, and I'm talking about what regulators actually did; take a look at GWU's graph's relating to regulatory agency rules and sizes, as well as the data on the Federal Register: https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/reg-stats
I mean, probably? If we had elected good officials at least. I'm not defending socialism at all, but if you accept the fact that this kind of thing happens because there's no monetary incentive for the industry to avoid it, then the logical conclusion is that under a system not motivated by profit this would be less likely to happen.
But what I'm sure you are aware of this line of thinking. What is the argument against it?
That is the argument against it. If you had elected good officials they would have created regulations against this already. Fact is that we can't elect good officials in the current system. Either it is because people would rather have more goods instead of caring about nature, or the system is corrupt and politicians use their power to enrich themselves rather than doing what people wants. Either case those politicians wont be fixing the problems you care about.
The problem with US politicians is that they are sold out to the private sector. This is a problem that would obviously not exist if there was no private sector, or if it was weaker, which is the "what if" of the discussion.
Sure, then we could elect politicians that are bad in different ways, but then this becomes a discussion against socialism, which is not what I'm intending here. I'm only talking about socialism hypothetically. My point is that we can't ignore capitalism's shortcomings. We have to understand what having profit as a main motivator leads to, so we can deal with it.
> The problem with US politicians is that they are sold out to the private sector. This is a problem that would obviously not exist if there was no private sector
You are diagnosing the symptom and not the cause. Politicians selling their power to the highest bidder is a symptom of politicians being corrupt and using their power to enrich themselves. Removing the private sector would give these corrupt cronies a lot more power to enrich themselves, that woudln't solve anything at all. Instead of having people with money and people with military power, you now have the same people having both power over industry and power over military, do you really think these people would now start caring about the environment over how much those factories are producing? No, these politicians still enrich themselves, they run these factories to make themselves as wealthy as possible and now there isn't even a government to stop them since they are the government.
Modern capitalism is based on the separation between capital and state. We call it corruption when capital is used to buy political power, or when political power is used to buy capital power. Communism is the merging of capital power and political power and giving this to the same ruling class, it is the ultimate form of what we in the west calls corruption.
Modern capitalism is an exhibition of capital's dependency on the state. Without the state, who would enforce a corporation's claims to property? (the products of worker labor, intellectual property, and so on)
And empirically, the bottom 70% of the US population on the wealth scale has absolutely zero influence on public policy. The policies of the US overwhelmingly align with the interests of US corporations. I'd contend they'd be much less dominating otherwise.
> The problem with US politicians is that they are sold out to the private sector.
No. The corruption is one of many symptoms of the problem, which is the fact that the electoral system is poorly designed for responsiveness and accountability, since it is structured so as to reinforce duopoly which incentivizes lesser-of-two-weasels voting.
You should read about the Great Leap Forward and The Four Pests campaign that lead to the greatest famine in human history with up to 55 million people dead from starvation and bodies piling up on sides of roads.
Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes. Mao decreed increased efforts to multiply grain yields and bring industry to the countryside. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting "surpluses" that in fact did not exist and leaving farmers to starve. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. The Great Leap resulted in tens of millions of deaths, with estimates ranging between 15 and 55 million deaths, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest famine in human history.
The Four Pests campaign (Chinese: 除四害; pinyin: Chú Sì Hài), was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward in China from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The extermination of sparrows is also known as smash sparrows campaign (Chinese: 打麻雀运动; pinyin: Dǎ Máquè Yùndòng) or eliminate sparrows campaign (Chinese: 消灭麻雀运动; pinyin: Xiāomiè Máquè Yùndòng), which resulted in severe ecological imbalance, being one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine. In 1960, Mao Zedong ended the campaign against sparrows and redirected the fourth focus to bed bugs.
"Better red than expert" is not a prerequisite for socialist thought. For what it's worth, putting totally unqualified ideologues in positions of real temporal power over the economy and health of the nation and watching them fuck everything up is something we do in modern capitalism, too. Our tools are different; political power grows not out of the barrel of a gun but a barrel full of money with a dollar sign on it.
I find it bafflingly common to encounter the conflation of authoritarianism with collectivism.
You can reach collectivism only trough authoritarianism.
Do you know any collectivist society above 1 million people that was not authoritarian?
Even China learned from the mistakes of collectivist ideas and moved towards socialist market economy which lead to the greatest uplifting of people from the extreme poverty in the whole history of human species.
Lots of downvoting, as you're about to find out. For some reason, HN really really hates the idea that there's enormous monetary incentive to ignore existential problems caused by modern capitalism.
Probably because, as Jeff Hammerbacher said, "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
I think HN really hates the histrionics that started this thread, "They heroically died for our capitalist masters". When people talk about HN becoming Reddit, this is one of the things they are talking about.
> I think HN really hates the histrionics that started this thread, "They heroically died for our capitalist masters". When people talk about HN becoming Reddit, this is one of the things they are talking about.
Oh absolutely, it's very clear HN hates that. Redditification is an ever-present threat, as I learned when I turned on showdead and finally saw, in almost every comment section, the root-level graveyards of "Very cool!" etc.
But that's an entirely different memeplex. HN hates that, but it also hates the idea that there's enormous monetary incentive to ignore existential problems caused by modern capitalism. One of the ways that displeasure might be shown is whataboutism regarding genuine if unhelpful "histrionics".
I've discussed this with libertarians and the best argument I've heard is that the incentive to manage negative externalities comes from private ownership. If the factory down the road is polluting the river that runs by your house, you sue them.
Well, sure, this is trying to fix capitalism, which is something I'm all for. But one way or another, I think it's vital to have the shortcomings of a capitalist system understood. It's one thing to believe capitalism is the way to go, it's another to go defend that we should always act in self interest and this will only lead to good things.
@babycake I take it that you are making a dig at Western society as a whole or just the U.S.? I think if you took some time and traveled to some of the non-capitalist (Marxist) countries you might see the utter horrifical ecological damage that they are doing and have done to the world. I think if all told you might find that capitalist countries have done a better job with the environment - I am not saying they have done a good job - just a better one than the Marxist countries.
The anti-capitlists have this utopian alternative world where all problems cease to exist and the power is distributed equally. I get the indulgence in the fantasy worlds but best to stick with reality and work with the system we have both the flaws and the strengths.
Perhaps consider a steel man instead of a straw one. Socialist institutions that cover natural monopolies save the state money simply by economies of scale. I'll grant not all industry could or should be nationalised but certainly healthcare in the US is a prime example of market failure.
I don't disagree with healthcare - its a complete debacle. That said the US models actually pays for a lot of the leading edge R&D in healthcare while a lot of foreign countries get to ride along the cost curve by buying that same healthcare after the bleeding edge making their healthcare costs more manageable.
That would be more tolerable if the US had better healthcare outcomes compared to those other nations. We don't -- they're doing it cheaper and better than we can. Probably the most important factor in getting good outcomes is catching diseases early. It doesn't matter how good your state-of-the-art new stage IV cancer treatment is, it's always going to be better to catch it early. Catching diseases early in their progression requires regular visits to the doctor, which in America cost an arm and a leg if you're not insured, leading to postponement of treatment and the poor outcomes we experience.
There are no "Marxist" countries on the planet. I'm not sure there ever were. I think I understand what you're trying to say, but someone could very easily take what you wrote as the suggestion that there are two types of countries: "capitalist" and "non-capitalist (Marxist)". That's... you should actually read Marx, or decide on a less fraught descriptor.
For that matter, how much of the ecological devastation in these poorer countries is being caused by a Western mining company or Western oil company or a Western baby-formula company?
I don't disagree; just like there are no true capitalist countries. However there is a degree in which you lean one way or the other and it may vary depending on industry. For instance the Health care in the United States mentioned earlier in this thread is thought to be capitalist - but it is so heavily regulated in certain ways that it is probably leaning more towards a Marxist creation.
>but it is so heavily regulated in certain ways that it is probably leaning more towards a Marxist creation
I find it interesting that you don't mention those ways, or why they might make the US healthcare system "Marxist". Marxism is a form of socioeconomic analysis, not an economic system, nor a scheme of healthcare regulation. I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to convey.
"Marxism"? "Communism"? What are we talking about again? Eh, who cares what words mean when you can bludgeon people with them! It's all "non-capitalist", which is a word that means "bad".
