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Yeah, this is a weird feature of “capitalism” in the last couple of decades…
See also: airlines. Like, literally most of them…
Like, not even due to “protectionism”, as with manufacturing and arguably banking and tech…
No no, just “we need this airline because otherwise prices will go up, even if it has effectively been trading insolvent for a decade, and hasn’t made a profit in even longer”…
Here, I’m talking about Virgin Australia specifically, but there’s also Lada Air, Kingfisher, Pelican, fucking Air Berlin…
It’s an industry where actually making any money is very much the exception rather than the rule…
Also, in entertainment: sports teams, and their ridiculous stadiums. Most have never turned a profit, and will (obviously) never pay off their mega stadiums (which is why masses of public money goes into building those)…
Ah, if only the free market was actually even relatively free…
That is an interesting thing. I nicknamed it Corporate Socialism. It's when the government and a company are hard to see the difference. The stadiums in Seattle were paid for by Microsoft and others. You can tell what was paid for by the big companies in the area and regular planners.
True. Yeah, we don’t really have that in Aus, so much…
The stadiums are either publicly owned, or owned by the individual sports leagues… Teams do also own stadiums, but only really the ones they use as training grounds, no matter whether they could actually host games or not (confusing, I know)…
Nonetheless, you have the situation where leagues and/or teams can readily bully the government into absurd, totally unnecessary half-billion dollar knockdown-rebuilds, much like in the US…
Again, the line between private and public is extremely murky, there, and that is the problem…
Airports are also like this, in most Australian cities…
Airports are the same here.
What's hilarious about sports teams is that one of the few to "turn a profit" and the only one where getting public money is the Green Bay Packers since the city of Green Bay actually owns the team. They're the last team to be publicly owned.
Honestly, all the more reason to love Green Bay.
Up the Packers!
I do love the regular white outs (as in snow) on the field (Lambeau?) - must be a competitive advantage for them and the Bills, lol!
Twitter falls into this as well, shittiest business alive became 4th most popular site on the entire internet.
We are not playing capitalism game here, we are playing interest group games.
I can't speak to other countries, but in the US, there's actually a strategic reason to prop up airlines. The law allows the government to commandeer their services in time of war, so there's basically a huge air force of transport aircraft in reserve.
Sports stadiums are just a pure grift though. They promise tax revenue at restaurants and hotels driven by spectators, but it takes a lot of sales tax to raise the millions of dollars the government spends to subsidize the stadium. I also think government officials view there being a certain prestige and having a professional sports team, so they cater to the owners in order to get or keep one- it's not their money after all.
Oh, the airline thing is most definitely complex, but if you look at the finances, taxes or indeed ownership structure of any of those airlines I mentioned (Virgin was and still is almost wholly owned by overseas venture capitalists, lol), it’s fucking absurd…
I appreciate the need for at least a flag carrier, and the more airlines the better (if they are functional and safe), however their current business model is absolutely insane, and yet rarely do they face the same scrutiny they faced in the past (TransAm, ANSETT collapses), or that, say, car manufacturers face…
They don’t really operate in anything even vaguely resembling a “free market”, is I guess the point…
Which makes me miss Homies in Outer Space even more