Leftists are obviously braindead but further to the point, did you know that health care in the US was embarrassingly cheap (embarrassing for doctors, that is) until doctors lobbied the government and formed a monopoly? http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html
The solution to high health care costs in the US is to dismantle medicine as a field and industry, and probably academia as a whole, and rebuild it sans cancer. This would solve most of society's problems, from woke totalitarianism to the covid response catastrophe to the competence crisis etc.
I've read this story before, and the mechanism is somewhat different now. The government is now captured in such a way that they limit the number of doctors themselves. They don't need any AMA to do it. The various people that benefit from healthcare being expensive do the lobbying just fine.
"Lodge practice" is what we would call the HMO. Sounds less good by that name.
That little article always makes me furious. We had such a great thing going, and then greedy doctors decided that instead of competing like an honest man, they would instead make backroom deals with the government to essentially wage lawfare on doctors that didn't comply.
I wonder who those doctors were. That kind of backroom scheming for total monopoly definitely reminds me of a certain group.
The medical industry lobby is so powerful it's been decades since supreme court rulings against it and not one federal or state attorney general has filed charges.
You wish, what would happen is mass energy rationing, 27 bureaucrat jobs for every production job, and a public union that somehow manages to fuck both their workers and the government at the same time. Not to mention the degradation and dereliction of the facilities and power lines.
If it's owned by the government, the public can request financial records. "Government run" private monopolies are opaque.
See, this is far less a problem of "government is corrupt" as it is "no one in our democracy bothers to hold government to account", which they technically have the power to do. People just expect things to work so long as they pay their taxes, and that was never true.
I get it; it's extremely onerous and frustrating, by design, to even figure out what governments are doing, let alone ascertaining who in particular is responsible, let alone fixing the problem, let alone reprimanding the guilty party.
But it is possible and the public consists of millions of people who waste most of their time on TV and social media. If we spent even a fraction of that time getting into the governments' business, rather than Brenda's on Facebook, we could have a real nice countey here.
I can't think of a single instance of the government fixing a monopoly. I can think of a lot of instances of the government causing and exacerbating them.
If anything, they have explicitly enforced monopolies time and again. The medical industry within the US (and abroad thanks to other governments) is an infamous oligopoly with little to no competition (leading to inflated prices). Then there's the US Postal Service and the American Letter Mail Company which was explicitly outlawed because it was so thoroughly outperforming the USPS for a fraction of the cost.
And in fact, when income taxes and the sort are in play, there's little incentive to actually break up any sort of monopoly or oligopoly. Think about it: It's guaranteed income with lesser chances of failing. It's steady and reliable income for the state. And that doesn't even touch the money laundering that is lobbying.
Private companies have to enter a special partnership and sell all their electricity to the government's company.
This was relatively recently used by ''Liberals'' ( in name only. Globalists is what they are ) to get bribes from contracts that result in a net, massive deficit for the public. ( you're probably aware of the Greenwashing project scams. ''we must do it to produce clean energy to save the planet!'' said energy costs several times the price and is unreliable )
One was a gas power station that never operated but we still pay for. From the ''gas is cleaner than coal'' era. Liberals were obsessed with making Québec dependant on gas imports for decades to ''strenghten Canadian unity'' and kill resistance to letting a pipeline cross our territory. Now it's less popular because the Liberal voters are eco nuts.
And several big wind turbine farms that cost 3 to 4 times what the curret energy price is in Quebec.
This means the public company is now shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into private hands who owe favors to Globalist ''Liberal'' politicians.
The Liberals also tried to make Hydro-Québec buy New-Brunswick Power Corporation, which isn't profitable AND charges much higher price than Hydro-Québec.
This move was to de-facto put Hydro-Québec into the jurisdiction of the Federal government, as it would have owned the energy market of two provinces.
The predictable outcome would have been forcing Hydro-Québec to ''equalize'' the energy costs to costumers of both provinces after non-stop whining about ''fairness''.
Thank God the Anglos in New-Brunswick threw a HUGE fit of public anger over having their energy market owned by us Frogs. Then some Quebec nationalists figured the consequences of Hydro-Québec owning NBPC and opposed it too.
At that point it was easy to derail the project by telling people in Québec it would massively increase their energy costs and let the Federal government shove its nose into all our energy decisions.
Globalists are alike everywhere they ruin nations.
Natural monopolies are not inherently bad inof themselves, so long as adequate precautions are taken.
The national energy grid is a good example of both things working well and things working poorly. It only makes sense to provide most customers with one electrical service. As long as the billing adequately reflects the cost of the delivered energy and the upkeep of the delivery system, and as long as there is a uniform set of standards to which that system is to be run, it's good.
The lack of competing grids is itself the result of regulation. That makes it inherently excluded from being "natural", due to government control over the supply of market competition.
You can support this, you can oppose this, it ultimately doesn't really matter where you stand on it. But it's not a natural monopoly.
The lack of competing grids is itself the result of regulation.
No, it's a consequence of physics.
Do you know what happens when two alternating current systems which are not in phase exist in close proximity to one another?
They fight. Literally. The phase angle between the two power signals resists each other. They don't even have to be physically attached, simply running two out of phase ac systems close to each other will cause some induced load from the opposed phases because wires are not perfect conductors.
If they connect, well...
Whichever system has more inertia will win (assuming the contact point survives for more than a few milliseconds). The other system's phase angle will be physically (violently) dragged up or down to the phase angle of the system that has more spinning mass. In effect, the generators which are out of phase will cease to be generators and momentarily become electric motors. This has profoundly bad consequences for both systems. In extreme cases it can cause turbine blades to fucking snap. Although realistically all it will do is cause a whole lot of breakers and safety relays to operate and cause a blackout.
Because they cannot coexist out of phase. As long as the phase angle isn't in sync, they aren't "powering" things, they're fighting each other.
This is why the proposed junction between the three grids (Tres Amigas Superstation) is designed around these giant fucking 20 mile long superconductive HVDC cables. Because to even think about having the grids coexist with each other, you first have to strip out phase angle entirely and convert the energy to DC.
How would "competing electrical grids" work? You'd run a new set of lines for each company to their own power plant? Every house would need to replace their end run if they switched power companies? Would everyone need their own set of poles, or would someone have a monopoly on that infrastructure?
Each power (or power distribution) company runs its own set of lines. States or cities could regulate right-of-way for utility paths the same way they manage traffic rules. Linking to your other comment, Japan has competing rail systems that mostly serve complementary routes but sometimes share space at stations. (though the government subsidizes JR and they are an oligopoly on the national scale)
Large thoroughfares could be duplicated in places where space is not at a premium. The issue comes as it gets closer to your house. It's not reasonable to have more than one set of power poles approaching your house. And trust me you only want to have to to that last-mile maintenance once after a storm.
I agree, and this is probably the furthest Left position I support.
Infrastructure monopolies are kinda the point of the government. You can't have competing electrical grids any more than you could have competing road/rail systems, competing electromagnetic spectrum, competing gas/water delivery etc. These things take up serious physical space and pretty much need to be universally accessible to be useful, so you regulate them via government.
What you can have is competing producers, ie private power plants or ISPs delivering service using government infrastructure, private shipping and transport using government roads
The problem that tends to arise is the government reaches too far, say with health care and education, and tries to regulate themselves a totally unnecessary monopoly.
Leftists are obviously braindead but further to the point, did you know that health care in the US was embarrassingly cheap (embarrassing for doctors, that is) until doctors lobbied the government and formed a monopoly? http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html
The solution to high health care costs in the US is to dismantle medicine as a field and industry, and probably academia as a whole, and rebuild it sans cancer. This would solve most of society's problems, from woke totalitarianism to the covid response catastrophe to the competence crisis etc.
Great link. Worthy of its own post.
I had always wondered about Shriners and others and what they were all for.
I've read this story before, and the mechanism is somewhat different now. The government is now captured in such a way that they limit the number of doctors themselves. They don't need any AMA to do it. The various people that benefit from healthcare being expensive do the lobbying just fine.
"Lodge practice" is what we would call the HMO. Sounds less good by that name.
I sort of remember that. My Dad is a doctor and there was a lot of odd talk about it when I was growing up. I know the tech has lagged because of it.
That little article always makes me furious. We had such a great thing going, and then greedy doctors decided that instead of competing like an honest man, they would instead make backroom deals with the government to essentially wage lawfare on doctors that didn't comply.
I wonder who those doctors were. That kind of backroom scheming for total monopoly definitely reminds me of a certain group.
Nearly 1/5 of taxes go to servicing the national debt. We're riding this shit to the scene of the crash.
The medical industry lobby is so powerful it's been decades since supreme court rulings against it and not one federal or state attorney general has filed charges.
It's even worse than you think: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/heading-towards-the-fiscal-cliff#details
You wish, what would happen is mass energy rationing, 27 bureaucrat jobs for every production job, and a public union that somehow manages to fuck both their workers and the government at the same time. Not to mention the degradation and dereliction of the facilities and power lines.
If it's owned by the government, the public can request financial records. "Government run" private monopolies are opaque.
See, this is far less a problem of "government is corrupt" as it is "no one in our democracy bothers to hold government to account", which they technically have the power to do. People just expect things to work so long as they pay their taxes, and that was never true.
I get it; it's extremely onerous and frustrating, by design, to even figure out what governments are doing, let alone ascertaining who in particular is responsible, let alone fixing the problem, let alone reprimanding the guilty party.
But it is possible and the public consists of millions of people who waste most of their time on TV and social media. If we spent even a fraction of that time getting into the governments' business, rather than Brenda's on Facebook, we could have a real nice countey here.
You can certainly make a law that private utilities must provide financial records. No need to be owned by the government for that.
Yes it's human nature. Democracy would never work in the long run.
Well, the FOIA is similar, and still runs into the old "it's classified" problem where all the stuff you actually want to know is redacted.
any time you see a take about the economy (on social media and even in real life) there's a good chance it's r/iamverysmart material
I don’t even read them anymore. Npc, midwit, woman in a red dress.
I can't think of a single instance of the government fixing a monopoly. I can think of a lot of instances of the government causing and exacerbating them.
If anything, they have explicitly enforced monopolies time and again. The medical industry within the US (and abroad thanks to other governments) is an infamous oligopoly with little to no competition (leading to inflated prices). Then there's the US Postal Service and the American Letter Mail Company which was explicitly outlawed because it was so thoroughly outperforming the USPS for a fraction of the cost.
And in fact, when income taxes and the sort are in play, there's little incentive to actually break up any sort of monopoly or oligopoly. Think about it: It's guaranteed income with lesser chances of failing. It's steady and reliable income for the state. And that doesn't even touch the money laundering that is lobbying.
A public monopoly is only as functional as the ethnic group running it.
See South Africa and what happened to its public infrastructure when the Boers were forced to let the Bantu take over.
Have governments ever run anything well?
Norway's oil monopoly?
No.
Government run energy company. No issues there
It worked in Québec before ''diversity''.
It will stop working like in South Africa when the staff is replaced by the invaders.
Could other companies compete?
Private companies have to enter a special partnership and sell all their electricity to the government's company.
This was relatively recently used by ''Liberals'' ( in name only. Globalists is what they are ) to get bribes from contracts that result in a net, massive deficit for the public. ( you're probably aware of the Greenwashing project scams. ''we must do it to produce clean energy to save the planet!'' said energy costs several times the price and is unreliable )
One was a gas power station that never operated but we still pay for. From the ''gas is cleaner than coal'' era. Liberals were obsessed with making Québec dependant on gas imports for decades to ''strenghten Canadian unity'' and kill resistance to letting a pipeline cross our territory. Now it's less popular because the Liberal voters are eco nuts.
And several big wind turbine farms that cost 3 to 4 times what the curret energy price is in Quebec.
This means the public company is now shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into private hands who owe favors to Globalist ''Liberal'' politicians.
The Liberals also tried to make Hydro-Québec buy New-Brunswick Power Corporation, which isn't profitable AND charges much higher price than Hydro-Québec.
This move was to de-facto put Hydro-Québec into the jurisdiction of the Federal government, as it would have owned the energy market of two provinces.
The predictable outcome would have been forcing Hydro-Québec to ''equalize'' the energy costs to costumers of both provinces after non-stop whining about ''fairness''.
Thank God the Anglos in New-Brunswick threw a HUGE fit of public anger over having their energy market owned by us Frogs. Then some Quebec nationalists figured the consequences of Hydro-Québec owning NBPC and opposed it too.
At that point it was easy to derail the project by telling people in Québec it would massively increase their energy costs and let the Federal government shove its nose into all our energy decisions.
Globalists are alike everywhere they ruin nations.
Thanks for explaining this. Always good to learn more about Canada.
Natural monopolies are not inherently bad inof themselves, so long as adequate precautions are taken.
The national energy grid is a good example of both things working well and things working poorly. It only makes sense to provide most customers with one electrical service. As long as the billing adequately reflects the cost of the delivered energy and the upkeep of the delivery system, and as long as there is a uniform set of standards to which that system is to be run, it's good.
The lack of competing grids is itself the result of regulation. That makes it inherently excluded from being "natural", due to government control over the supply of market competition.
You can support this, you can oppose this, it ultimately doesn't really matter where you stand on it. But it's not a natural monopoly.
No, it's a consequence of physics.
Do you know what happens when two alternating current systems which are not in phase exist in close proximity to one another?
They fight. Literally. The phase angle between the two power signals resists each other. They don't even have to be physically attached, simply running two out of phase ac systems close to each other will cause some induced load from the opposed phases because wires are not perfect conductors.
If they connect, well...
Whichever system has more inertia will win (assuming the contact point survives for more than a few milliseconds). The other system's phase angle will be physically (violently) dragged up or down to the phase angle of the system that has more spinning mass. In effect, the generators which are out of phase will cease to be generators and momentarily become electric motors. This has profoundly bad consequences for both systems. In extreme cases it can cause turbine blades to fucking snap. Although realistically all it will do is cause a whole lot of breakers and safety relays to operate and cause a blackout.
Because they cannot coexist out of phase. As long as the phase angle isn't in sync, they aren't "powering" things, they're fighting each other.
This is why the proposed junction between the three grids (Tres Amigas Superstation) is designed around these giant fucking 20 mile long superconductive HVDC cables. Because to even think about having the grids coexist with each other, you first have to strip out phase angle entirely and convert the energy to DC.
How would "competing electrical grids" work? You'd run a new set of lines for each company to their own power plant? Every house would need to replace their end run if they switched power companies? Would everyone need their own set of poles, or would someone have a monopoly on that infrastructure?
Each power (or power distribution) company runs its own set of lines. States or cities could regulate right-of-way for utility paths the same way they manage traffic rules. Linking to your other comment, Japan has competing rail systems that mostly serve complementary routes but sometimes share space at stations. (though the government subsidizes JR and they are an oligopoly on the national scale)
Large thoroughfares could be duplicated in places where space is not at a premium. The issue comes as it gets closer to your house. It's not reasonable to have more than one set of power poles approaching your house. And trust me you only want to have to to that last-mile maintenance once after a storm.
I agree, and this is probably the furthest Left position I support.
Infrastructure monopolies are kinda the point of the government. You can't have competing electrical grids any more than you could have competing road/rail systems, competing electromagnetic spectrum, competing gas/water delivery etc. These things take up serious physical space and pretty much need to be universally accessible to be useful, so you regulate them via government.
What you can have is competing producers, ie private power plants or ISPs delivering service using government infrastructure, private shipping and transport using government roads
The problem that tends to arise is the government reaches too far, say with health care and education, and tries to regulate themselves a totally unnecessary monopoly.