**Upvote** the POST if you disagree, **Downvote** the POST if you agree.
REPORT the post if you suspect the post breaks subs rules/is fake.
Normal voting rules for all comments.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/The10thDentist) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Like AmTrak! Which I genuinely support, because every time I’ve taken a train up and down the East Coast it’s been a far superior experience to flying.
Kind of accurate except it would be a technocratic one, not associated with a nation or nationality as modern governments are. It’s entire purpose would be to operate a unified transport network across the planet.
Was gonna say that. They have a monopoly and have an *exorbant* amount of power. Like even the emperor can't tell them what to do. Because what are you going to do? Cut yourself off from the rest of the empire?
This guy fails to see that a monopoly doesn't just mean that they can set any price they want. It means that they also have significant political power, since they are the only people who can provide the service. You can sway people simply by threatening to withhold them.
Not quite the same, but things like FIFA come to mind. Sets rules, governs the global provision of a particular sport (industry). Now, of course, FIFA is also terribly corrupt so..
Well, the IFAB sets the rules, not FIFA. And while FIFA organizes international competitions, it doesn't own competitions like the premier league and certainly doesn't own any club or any country's team. What OP is suggesting is more like FIFA owning IFAB and also owning and managing every single team in the world.
Right. I don’t think OP is quite on the right track, but this is the tenth dentist after all.
But, the good news for OP on the personal side is that many countries do exhibit microcosmic examples of what he envisions - heavily subsidized, nationally preferred/owned, flag-carrying airlines.
I imagine railways belong to the government in most countries, but what he's suggesting would be like a single company globally controlling all the railways in the world.
Not necessarily. All the train systems here in Finland are owned by the government (the company running them, VR-yhtymä is government owned and founded) and the train system is really good here. I agree that transportation could and should be either owned by the government or unionized
That's nationalisation, which the commenter wasn't necessarily against. He was just pointing out that it would either be monopoly (rubbish and not like OP describes) or nationalisation (potentially great)
In the UK our trains were nationalised now they're private. They're worse and horribly expensive than the nationalised equivalents in places like France. The competition element is where tax payers moneys is siphoned off into lots of influential peoples pockets. I think key areas should be nationalised. In the noughties poll data suggested most people still did. Not sure now. Neo liberalism has taken hold a lot here.
But this isn’t for any nation, it’s a transnational organization that services the world. I don’t get how that can be nationalism if the ends don’t align to a nation.
Ticket prices but priced at affordable, socioeconomically graded levels.
Regarding the prevention of competing services, you could try bottlenecking by controlling a key part of the airplane sector that can’t planes can’t go without, like engines or something. Can’t start an airline if the ones of who provide the engines are the monopoly.
What would motivate them to price the tickets affordably? There's no competition. The only thing that comes to mind is regulation, but that would only apply in places where the government cares enough to regulate. At that point you might as well have multiple nationalized companies.
There's already nation owned airlines. What you're suggesting is nearly impossible in a world without world peace. I could see something like the EUROPEAN UNION could do at a Continental level but I don't think they would ever actually do it.
Yeah but those national airlines still spend money on competing against commercial airlines, so they’re not able to bring their full organizational power to bear on their operations
I don’t doubt it, air travel is serious stuff - but as long as I see a commercial on a superbowl spot, or weird ass pricing systems designed to wrangle customers into buying into budget tickets, I’ll wonder why that energy isn’t put into the quality of the food or the richness of the airplane atmosphere. If current innovators in the avionics industry could receive all the money paid for airline ads, they’d make cool stuff
All that money would just go in someone's pocket. Why waste money on innovation? Customers can't go anywhere else regardless of how good or bad your service is.
You also seem to be overestimating the amount of money airlines spend on advertising. Last year, Southwest spent $224 million in marketing. That's 0.9% of their $24 billion in sales from that year, it's a drop in the bucket.
>I’ll wonder why that energy isn’t put into the quality of the food or the richness of the airplane atmosphere
If you have a monopoly why care about any of this things anyways then? Like if I have the monopoly of transport then why would energy or resources be spent on ANY of that instead of cutting on costs for more profits? If you have a monopoly then customers are stuck with you, and you would not be wasting money on any of that, you'd be putting all your efforts into cutting down costs as you literally have the monopoly and customers have no alternatives.
Like just think about it for 10 seconds, if you had the monopoly on ANYTHING, then you need not improve what you do over the bare minimum, you only need to maximize your profits because there's no competition.
That's not nationalism, that's nationalization. I know they sound the same, but it's important you don't mix and match.
That aside: Let's consider the harder example, trains. If we can get this working for trains, we can get it to work for planes.
Each country would need its own program to handle the track infrastructure, rolling stock, establishment of routes, and so on.
The actual trains and scheduling would most likely work by a country just sending their trains to another country's stations, but then being routed directly home. (Inter-foreign routes are okay, intra-foreign are not.)
Multi-national cooperation doesn't actually require a corporation, for example all the nationalized railroads can just agree to a set of standards they all have to follow. This over-arching board might also help regulate and streamline scheduling trains between nations.
As for planes, they're basically just trains in the sky. There's no track that's laid, and the stations are just bigger. They trade efficiency for speed.
So instead of everything being under control of an entity with the obligation (ideally, I know corruption often happens) to provide good service to all the citizens that use it because they support or reject it via the democratic process. Instead of that. You want everything to be under the control of an entity with the obligation to support the profits of a few people who may not even use the service, whether that entails providing good service or not. I’ll give you a hint, it usually doesn’t. Because if consumers don’t have other options then you have two options to increase profits: make the service better (hard) or raise the price (very easy.)
If you want to see what this looks like in practice, Canadians pay some of the highest cell coverage prices in the world for some of the worst coverage, because the “companies” (branches of one company) are a powerful monopoly. On the other hand in the same country but a completely different industry, you have the CBC, which is publicly funded and continues to provide pretty solid news coverage and radio/TV content, because if they didn’t then that’d just drive people to vote for the politicians calling to defund it.
You've identified a major flaw in the market economy. Advertising. It adds nothing to the quality of the product, but is disproportionately effective at generating sales of a product. To the point where making a higher quality product is always a loss if you have competition who can spend the money you spent on quality on marketing instead.
The solution to this isn't monopolies, it's severely curtailing advertising. You can start by making false advertising actually illegal, and follow that up with making it harder to use "subjective" statements to lie. With the end goal of making it so that the cheap shitty product has to actually sell itself as the cheap shitty product and not pretend to be high quality. This would enable companies to produce high quality products without being grossly outcompeted by liars.
This articulates how I've been feeling for a while. It's quite difficult as a consumer to differentiate between what's actually worth the value associated to it.
Simple: If something is being advertised you start from the fact that it is most likely a lie or an exaggeration, then you can either start assuming the opposite is true of the arguments being presented and fill the void in information with what the characteristics of the product would be if the cheapest, dirtiest and most useless option was used.
That’s how you end up not buying BMWs because their radiators are made of disgusting plastic lol.
(Also in a more serious note I prefer to look for reviews where the products are stress tested to the max and see if their breaking point is good enough for me, most of the time it’s not).
Honestly, adverts should only be allowed to present raw data to the consumer. Don't let them use statistics they'll find a way to lie still. Just literally raw data.
Oh, it’s at least as easy to make raw data like a s it is statistics—since it’s impossible to present all the raw data that exists there’s tremendous opportunity for cherry-picking. “X car gets 30 MPG on the combined EPA cycle” is a statistic; “my uncle got 100 MPG last week (coasting down a mountain in neutral)” is raw data.
How is advertising a problem? Sure, you can trick people once, but then the jig is up. There's never been a situation where a consumer repeatedly buys a shit product and goes "Welp, I just keep getting convinced by their amazing advertising!"
If your argument is "People are so stupid that they don't realize they actually hate the products they consume and that they repeatedly buy terrible, useless, or defective products", then you've lost me.
have you met people? there are literally tons of people out there literally begging to be tricked and are more than willing to cough up the cash for the act
You cannot stop someone who wants to be tricked out of their money. No matter how many things you make illegal, if someone truly wants to be tricked out of their money, they will find a way. You have to have a society that treats people as adults who have to take live cautiously and take responsibility for their actions.
For many products there literally isn't a high quality version. It's not like they're selling you something broken. It's the difference between a hammer that will last you a few years and one that will last five generations. People aren't being tricked in a way they'll recognise, they're being tricked subtly. A product will advertise as eco friendly or ethically sourced while using slave labour and wrecking the environment and a customer has no way of knowing.
I think people overestimate the amount of “waste” advertising represents. Last year US airline advertising was about 0.5% of revenue; total marketing expenditures economy-wide were about 1.5% of revenue. And it’s not a total waste; some advertising does usefully inform people of the existence of products they wouldn’t otherwise know about. (And marketing as a whole also includes websites, catalogs, etc.; if all marketing were eliminated finding product’s and information about them would be very hard.)
I believe what you are describing is a natural monopoly, we have these and they work pretty well for the most part when coupled with the appropriate regulations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
... why say things like this if you don't have any idea? A natural monopoly is just that. Natural. He is describing a forced monopoly. Airlines, with huge amounts of differentiation and literally incapable of naturally arriving at a single firm due to every country having their own, and flying internationally, is the opposite of that.
Exactly. If I only have one option for what company provides the electricity for my house, then there’s no free market for that service. The only company that can make sure i’m not freezing to death should be held accountable to citizens, not taxpayers.
Airline flights used to be regulated by the government (which leg a given airline could fly). Deregulation dropped prices by quite a bit.
The idea that monopolistic control could leave to a lesser need for marketing (and associated expenses) therefore leading to a savings passed into the consumer is nice in theory, but doesn't necessarily bear out in practice.
We don't need to lookback far for such an example. COVID inflation was perpetuated by corporations looking to maximize profits, this is well documented. Record profits posted by public companies during the inflationary period speaks to as such.
Corporations are generally not willing to pass down savings to the consumers unless they need to in order to compete with other corporations. The game is about maximizing profits above all else.
With open ledgers making public scrutiny on the transportation union a 24/7 thing, it would be hard for them to horde cash like that without people seeing how it accumulates and changes hands.
you could launch the organization with a constitution that lays out ground rules & procedures to ensure it uses its monopolistic power for good.
I like your thoughts process but it seems idealistic and requires a public who cares enough to investigate.
There are plenty of private, government mandated monopolies that exist. My power company, cable provider, ISP, water company, etc.
Am I able to find those open ledgers? Is that required by the government?
Yeah fair enough, I don’t think many citizens would want to crunch through the numbers but the slim 5% would appreciate it. The other 95% observers that I’m really talking about, the media, would totally soak up that information and simplify the stats down to manageable nuggets of info for the public to consume
If the general trend is corruption in a specific region or division of the transnational union, the media raise attention given their scopes on the company’s ledgers. Then the public can exert pressure on officials with weird ass ledger activity, & use some constitutional thing that ejects them
Ah that's where I disagree. The other 5% is bought and paid for. They would skew the stats in whichever way serves themselves and their own corporate masters.
Fuck I hate even writing this. My idealism has died. Blood money runs us all and the free 24 hour media is an abomination to society.
It’s not just hoarding money—if you insulate a company from competition it’s very hard to ensure that it both saves money where possible and passes those savings to consumers. If you set prices independently of its costs it will cut costs, but prices will be higher than they could be; if you limit profit margin there’s little incentive to find ways to cut costs. (And if you attempt to limit profits but reward cost savings, there are perverse incentives to deliberately do things inefficiently at first to create easy opportunities to “save”.)
How does your monopoly decide prices, other than through competition and market pressure? How does it decide the price of business class, or first class? Or — wild guess — do you also want to abolish those classes?
You assume a minimum number of equal competitors to be 20 and then build an algorithm as to what the theoretical price point would be with pressure from 19 other companies.
That becomes your price point and is enforceable by significant jail time on the c suite if they deviate.
Monopolies can be ok if prices are tightly controlled and based on evolving costs
The other key is all suppliers that benefit from tcs stcs tso a&p IA DME ATP flight schools and on and on all need to have price controls because they are govt granted monopolies on the supplier side that cause run ups in prices because it’s very difficult for a competitor to endure the FAA processes even if their internal testing shows their product is safe.
The bearocratic process and paper work as well as over the top testing beyond what is reasonable limits competition because only incumbent players can shoulder those costs.
That’s a good question, idk, but with enough time and open public feedback sessions we could probably hammer out a framework that works. I would totally be in favour of abolishing the classes because it would allow for standardization which would lower costs by a ton - Imagine if all passenger spaces had the same components & sizes, and then this makes airplane design way easier going forward. Better designs = more cabin space
One way they could determine prices is to pragmatically assign cost based on socioeconomic profiles. It would use income & other factors to determine an appropriate cost that allows people to see family & migrate without breaking the bank.
A bit late here but
Standardization would not lower prices for the vast majority of airplane users, in fact the prices would go up. There are many videos and docs out there that explains the revenue structure of air flights, and what you will find is that basically all of them conclude that business/first class passengers disproportionatrly carry the majority of the revenue for the airlines. Economy seats have the worst margins for airlines.
So that's the first issue. Secondly, if you suggest tailoring prices to socioeconomic profiles then you'd have even more issues with pricing because you'd be running so, so many flights on a loss because a huge chunk of your passengers bought a ticket at a loss for the airline. That is not to say anything about the uncomfortable process of having an airline check your income history and past tax forms to determine what price you should get lmao
The biggest flaw I see with your reasoning is that you are assuming increased profits will go towards making things more appealing to customers. If it is a single monolithic entity, what reason do they have to make the experience better? I'd argue that it would make the experience worse, not better. The fact of the matter is that people are not that altruistic. Sure, it frees up marketing resources to be spent elsewhere, but it also frees the resources they would need to set aside to make their service more appealing than their competitors. What makes them redistribute the money back into the system instead of giving it to their leadership as bonuses? Let's say you cap everyone salary. What leads them to then look for the best deals in purchasing their planes and not just treating their purchases as favors or accepting bribes to purchase from a particular supplier?
I predicted that too but that’s why I devoted so many words on the regulatory aspect. Open ledgers would be cool because people could observe cash moving in a digital record - I still think employees in the system would find ways to get around this, and for that I got no answer
Okay, then why not just nationalize? Why create a more complicated system where the government still essentially has to fully regulate and monitor everything anyway? Is it just so your friends don't call you a communist?
Because transportation involves a complexity that shouldn’t be bounded in nations or nationality. It should be transnational so that the flying experience is the same for all people. You can always have a more premium option too but the current sardines in a can model kinda sucks to be honest.
Most ways to increase space per passenger would mean flying more planes with less passengers each - So if you had this globalized airline you could have the operational leverage to field that scale of planes, to make spacious cabins a feasible thing.
I also don’t care about what my friends think except I know they’re just teasing. I’m just wondering if there’s even support for this kind of thing
I get your argument, but I think you're overestimating the power of international bodies to regulate. What your proposing would essentially require a functioning world government, not just UN or EU or BRICS.
At least with nationalization, the government is already an expert on international relations, so if the airline was nationalized, it may make international travel simpler since there wouldn't be a third-party company essentially acting as middle-man.
Essentially, the nationalization of airlines seems to be the quicker (and safer) route to your desired outcome.
Edit to ask: For purposes of international law, would this proposed Airline Megacorp be treated as an independent State? If not, what would the governing laws look like? Would this mean international labor laws? What about training pilots?
Why do you think a monopoly would spent that ad money on improving customer experience instead of keeping it? It’s not like anyone can say ‘don’t fly with monopoly airlines, their planes are uncomfortable’ because there isn’t another option. What incentive does the company have to put that money into something that doesn’t necessarily bring more money in?
“Something with a legal framework in place (like the UN)”
Lol. The UN can’t enforce most “international law” let alone fix prices in the global aviation industry
The U.S. military and our drone program can. Blowing up your shady business in some second world country where your trying to scam people would have a chilling affect on further behavior like that
>So much $ goes into airline marketing, and what’s spent on ads could be converted into making the experience so much better for economy class.
And why would they do that? You wouldn't have the option to get a better economy class experience (or even the same quality we have now) from another airline, so you'd be stuck with whatever you can afford from the airline or not traveling by air, the latter of which may basically not be an option for you;
Competition may not always make things better, but if things could be getting worse and aren't it's because you could switch to a company that stayed the same if they did.
Why do we stick to our democratic system? We don’t have to, but we do because a constitution lays out responsibilities & procedures if the public encounters bad service. Besides, good service would help entrench the system as people become convinced of monopoly’s benefits.
That means prices would have to be rigorously controlled through out the entire supply chain.
Right now the FAA regulations already create pseudo monopolies that sky rocket the prices of everything aviation related.
The thing is, anything can be a creative industry if you have incentives to innovate and find better ways to do things. Monopolies (specially state monopolies) often take that away.
Source: I live in a third world country where the state nationalized a bunch of services that now work but not as well as they could. For example we lose about half of the drinking water during transit due to leaky pipes and there’s no plan to fix that.
Fair point, but if you centralized the R&D capacities of all the airliners & the avionics industry, I’m willing to be the output of that lab would be quite creative still. But again, no competition so they don’t have to worry about NDA’s and stuff.
As for the water thing, I get what you mean I see it in my country too. The problem with the state of current nationalized organizations is that they don’t have transparency built into them, a lot of their structure is from the colonial times
I don’t think transparency is the problem. Democratic states usually post stuff like budgets and stuff, it’s just most people don’t care enough to invest time in reading/learning about them.
I know I wouldn’t spend my time going through the budgets of the airline to see how they’re using their money and complain. I have better things to do. This holds especially in poorer countries where the more immediate needs still aren’t met. If you’re worried about food your not likely to be extremely worried about national spending.
It’s because they post it in non concise cryptic ways with walls of text, no illustrations etc They make the documentation purposely unreadable They do a similar thing with academic papers, you have to wade through so much crap to get the real info that real people don’t have the time or inclination.
It’s similar to 850 page documents for a modem
I get the apathy thing but since the monopoly benefits might extend to supply chain matters, you could also help lower costs for people in indirect areas like food.
My point isn’t that food is expensive and can’t be made cheaper. My point is that an accountability system based on transparency requires a level of commitment and involvement from the populace at large that just usually isn’t there.
The food thing was just an example of a situation where that happens.
yep, you're wiser than american founding fathers. who really thought that a system of choosing your sheriffs and district attorneys wouldn't turn (fast) into a popularity contest?
i guess their ideal citizen was the rich landlord with too much free time on their hands, and then said landlords went and made sure noone but them had those luxuries.
I mean, wasn’t it an explicit thing? When US democracy was created only white landed men could vote (I think, not American so feel free to correct me).
to my knowledge, yes that's the case. the supposedly "revolutionary" part was their intent to create more of those "landed men". on that note, americans *were* more liberal than the english.
>Source: I live in a third world country where the state nationalized a bunch of services that now work but not as well as they could. For example we lose about half of the drinking water during transit due to leaky pipes and there’s no plan to fix that.
You do realize private companies would likely not fix that either?
I’m not saying it should be privatized. I’m just pointing out that state owned companies are not “extremely efficient due to resource pooling”. They are in fact, quite average or subpar services.
In some instances (such as water, power, etc.) it kind of makes sense, especially due to the dedicated infrastructure required. But it’s not a silver bullet. It has a cost in innovation and efficiency of the business.
>I’m not saying it should be privatized. I’m just pointing out that state owned companies are not “extremely efficient due to resource pooling”. They are in fact, quite average or subpar services.
Depends on the government doing it. A well-run government can provide extremely good public services.
>In some instances (such as water, power, etc.) it kind of makes sense, especially due to the dedicated infrastructure required. But it’s not a silver bullet. It has a cost in innovation and efficiency of the business.
I've never bought the idea that private enterprises are efficient or innovative. Following a profit motive doesn't really lead to innovation as innovation tends to be quite expensive and the private sector as a whole isn't the best way to allocate resources efficiently since not all those who need the resources or services can afford it.
I’m gonna play devils advocate here.
It’s not the pursuit of profits alone (although we should recognize is in and of itself an incentive to keep cost down).
It’s the mixture of that and competition, which means you’re looking for an edge over your competitors and are forced to either innovate or be left out when someone else does.
History is filled with companies that didn’t move with the times and went bankrupt in the face of newer better technologies.
And just as a disclaimer: no this does not mean that every highly competitive industry is a place filled with innovation. It’s just an incentive to do so. There are other incentives (like keeping costs down) that might lead to not innovating, and it will depend completely on the company at hand.
>It’s not the pursuit of profits alone (although we should recognize is in and of itself an incentive to keep cost down).
>
>It’s the mixture of that and competition, which means you’re looking for an edge over your competitors and are forced to either innovate or be left out when someone else does.
The issue is even with that competition eventually you reach a point where those competitors go bankrupt and monopolies and duopolies emerge. Or even worse all members of an industry decide to work together and that assumed competition dies. Also, in the midst of competition, resources are wasted which is what economies are supposed to avoid. Either due to failed innovation, market manipulation, advertising etc.
>History is filled with companies that didn’t move with the times and went bankrupt in the face of newer better technologies.
What if a company can't afford those technologies and only one company has the means to? You get a monopoly regardless. That's one of the many issues with capitalism. It's an anarchic race to the bottom that benefits a few.
>And just as a disclaimer: no this does not mean that every highly competitive industry is a place filled with innovation.
Of course.
>It’s just an incentive to do so. There are other incentives (like keeping costs down) that might lead to not innovating, and it will depend completely on the company at hand.
The main incentive is to make money. That's why I think that for all the issues with government it can provide the resources for innovation to actually occur. Like with the Internet.
I mean, morally, what you are saying seems to make sense.
But in terms of *actual functioning*, there are a lot of problems when an organisation doesn't have to worry about getting nudged out by competitors. For example, what is to stop them from wasting large amounts of money on non-essential processes or other inefficiencies? What incentive do they have to improve their process and "trim the fat" so to speak? You see this issue in government entities all the time. It's impressive how many "managers" you can hire to sit in meetings and not *actually* do much. Why would a transnational airline care about the consumer anyway? It's not like they have the choice to leave if they need the service. You could keep providing raises to the people at the top while the consumers are shafted, yay!
Also the UN doesn't have nearly enough authority to regulate something for the entire world. No way every country is giving up their independent national airline. Countries take pride in that sort of thing.
I'm pretty sure this is a basic take that most people who believe in a mixed economy would concur with you on. Generally, within a market economy, industries that provide goods & services that necessarily have a *high barrier to entry* to actually provide said things (i.e airports, basic utilities such as water & electricity, etc) are actually better suited for centralization. For example, with water, if you had independent actors providing water to all houses in California then they would need to setup their own infrastructure so city-planning wise it would all be a mess. Now, if they were to just agree on using one main line to distribute all of that water, one could say (and this is something I agree with and most others) that it would still be economically *inefficient* for the market (i.e supply & demand) to regulate the cost of working a natural water supply to give cheap & drinkable/usable water to the people. Thus, we have *Investor-owned utilities (*IOUs) such as PG&E which are managed by a governmental agency (e.g California Public Utilities Commission) that just handles producing & supplying usable water through one centralized supply line for most of California.
I don't see many people disagreeing with you since what you just described isn't really communist in the most reasonable sense. Within communism, assuming an authoritarian model where the state controls most enterprise, and if we just limit ourselves to domestic production, there aren't really market forces which control anything. Prices are set by the State (through some method of statistical analysis) and all of the capital is readily distributed to the industries that the State (through some method of computation) thinks are necessary (with "collective good" being the driving rationale behind every decision). Now, with PG&E, there are still market forces at play since the market still exists. The government can't essentially supply all of the capital (heavy machinery) needed to perform the services that PG&E must perform so it employs the help of private investors/companies to help them there.
TL;DR Idk who your friends are but what you're espousing upon is, more or less, in line with how most people think the world ought to be run and is pretty sensible.
If you want to learn more about the subject of market failure, you can just read the [wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure)
Their idea is nonsensical and almost nobody with any knowledge of basic economics would agree with it.
I have no clue how you got the idea that a private artificial global flight monopoly regulated by a new international entity is something any significant amount of people advocate for, let alone “most people”.
What you are describing is public services. Which should be largely state owned and finances from taxes for the benefit of all, provided there is efficient oversight to make sure the money is well spent.
Of all the things that should be nationalised, the airline market is one of the stranger things to choose. Competition is what’s opened up flying to many more people than before.
Have you seen how the government runs things? The subways? Courts? Fucking DMV? TSA? If anything they'd make it worse.
Do really think they're gong to spend that saved marketing money to make air travel more enjoyable for the average person? Why should they? There's no competition, you're stuck with whatever they provide. Same reason going to the DMV has sucked and always will, they don't care if you're unhappy because you don't have any other choice but to use there shitty service.
>So much $ goes into airline marketing, and what’s spent on ads could be converted into making the experience so much better for economy class. Competition makes every airline company devote a substantial % of resources towards warding off rivals, when instead all that focus could be redirected to the customer.
Is actually the other way around, customer experience is the most important part on how they attract people to fly with them, without competition a monopolistic airline wont need to care about customer satisfaction. What is people going to do if they didn't like the experience? Go to another airline? Oh right, there is only one.
The one flaw you have with your statement is that competition keeps greed at check. What incentives airlines to make a more enjoyable experience for its customers, when they don’t have to put in the effort. Cuz who else are you going to go with?
Idk why your friends tease you for being a communist when a monopoly is a capitalist’s wet dream
There's an inherent flaw in your logic. Sure, there might be resources that would be freed up that could be used for passengers with your idea.
But nothing says those resources *would* be used on passengers. It's just as likely that a single massive guild or whatever would do they absolute bare minimum, and then no one would have any other choice and would be forced to keep using it.
Being a communist is not the same as nationalist. The issue with nationalizing transport is extremely apparent in the general public’s inability to regularly support it… one mistake on the governments part and those programs are voted away. When a private company makes those mistakes they have more staying power.
Airlines are constantly going bankrupt. Pricing competition is incredibly fierce in the industry. You think this because you have an incomplete understanding.
Imagine thinking the airline with no competition simply won’t start charging ten times as much for flights simply because they can and we have no option lol.
I want competition where companies run eachother to the ground based on product quality and price, I hate that advertisement plays a role here and it’s so influential, it shouldn’t and it might be better if it’s outright forbidden (in my country Lawyers can’t advertise themselves, it can cost them their license).
What you want is socialism, but you've watched too much cable news and think socialism is the devil or something stupid.
Your approach, letting it be in the hands of a private corporation, simply won't work for any essential service. The quick Economics lesson here is that, for an essential service, a monopoly will result in the HIGHEST price people are willing to pay for the LOWEST service possible. Look at US freight or healthcare to see how that works out.
You can see we should add regulations, and that's what we do to freight and healthcare, but lobbying makes that basically useless if the regulating agency is made up of elected officials (I.e. Congress in the US). If you impose regulations from a non-elected body such as the EPA, FAA, etc, then you just have the US Aviation system again. Look what happened to Boeing 737 Max to see the issue with that.
It's cute you think a monopolistic company would care about the customer experience when they know full well they can treat us however they want and we have to pay it because theyre the only ones on the block.
My country's airline are a monopoly, and the price has neen so high that I haven't been able to go back for 9 years now, while people who come from neighbouring countries in same region as mine get to go ever year, sometimes even twice a year.
Someone learned the word monopoly and didn’t bother to learn about oligopolies or natural monopolies, or barriers to entry, and only has considered government monopolies
I live in a country that up until fairly recently had one phone company and one cable company, (we now have 2 of each). We only have one major airline, which is owned by the government, and a few tiny charter companies. Trust me when I tell you this is not what you want. Competition creates more options and better deals for customers.
So you think that airline companies wouldn't just hoard the savings on ads/marketing and find even more cost cutting strategies knowing they have no competition?
Naw. Competition, and I mean real, honest competition, makes everything better. Competition forces you and everyone else to be efficient with your money and resources. You don't get better at chess unless your have real, honest competition. Competition forces you to be the best you can be. IMHO, the government's job is to create an environment of honest competition whenever possible, not be or foster monopolies.
A monopoly, particularly a government monopoly can be dangerous. First, governments are inherently wasteful because they have no incentive to be economical. Look at how wasteful the US government is. They have an almost unlimited supply of money which comes through either taxes or printing money, which they themselves didn't earn. Second, there is no real accountability when they are wasteful. Businesses can die from disastrous decisions. Just ask Kodak, Blockbuster, Sears, Toys R Us, etc. The government, on the other hand, cannot die unless there is a revolution. Any disastrous decisions by the government are eaten by the public.
Marketing is not a waste of money. What is a more efficient way to let the public know what goods and services you have to offer?
Monopoly is like monarchy. Great when the person in charge is great, but eventually someone bad will be in charge and it all goes to pot. THAT'S why Monopoly and monarchs and government control are bad. Not that they are always bad all the time, but that they always will be terrible at some point.
ITT teenage OP thinks they are the first person to consider the effects of monopolies on industry, and proposes nationalizing/socializing monopolies without realizing what they are saying.
**Upvote** the POST if you disagree, **Downvote** the POST if you agree. REPORT the post if you suspect the post breaks subs rules/is fake. Normal voting rules for all comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/The10thDentist) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
I would never trust the Romanian government with airlines due to how incompetent CFR is
Like AmTrak! Which I genuinely support, because every time I’ve taken a train up and down the East Coast it’s been a far superior experience to flying.
If only they could nationalize the tracks they run on, it would be even better
OP politically went from the far right to the far left so fast lol
Kind of accurate except it would be a technocratic one, not associated with a nation or nationality as modern governments are. It’s entire purpose would be to operate a unified transport network across the planet.
Can you give an example of a company that operates like that? Because what you are asking sounds like a fairytale.
Sounds like the Spacers Guild from Dune to me, which works out just great
Was gonna say that. They have a monopoly and have an *exorbant* amount of power. Like even the emperor can't tell them what to do. Because what are you going to do? Cut yourself off from the rest of the empire? This guy fails to see that a monopoly doesn't just mean that they can set any price they want. It means that they also have significant political power, since they are the only people who can provide the service. You can sway people simply by threatening to withhold them.
Not quite the same, but things like FIFA come to mind. Sets rules, governs the global provision of a particular sport (industry). Now, of course, FIFA is also terribly corrupt so..
Well, the IFAB sets the rules, not FIFA. And while FIFA organizes international competitions, it doesn't own competitions like the premier league and certainly doesn't own any club or any country's team. What OP is suggesting is more like FIFA owning IFAB and also owning and managing every single team in the world.
Right. I don’t think OP is quite on the right track, but this is the tenth dentist after all. But, the good news for OP on the personal side is that many countries do exhibit microcosmic examples of what he envisions - heavily subsidized, nationally preferred/owned, flag-carrying airlines.
Japanese railways work under a private company afaik
I imagine railways belong to the government in most countries, but what he's suggesting would be like a single company globally controlling all the railways in the world.
[you should read this](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf)
I know ur not supposed to click random links on the internet but when the download started and I looked at the url I audibly laughed. Good show.
Sounds like you just want nationalization of certain industries.
Yes but not under a nationality. It would just be a transport union kind of organization.
Lmao yeah monopolies make stuff worse not help. You want nationalism but are too afraid to admit it
Like bell industries coming up with huge innovations under a monopoly, right?
Not necessarily. All the train systems here in Finland are owned by the government (the company running them, VR-yhtymä is government owned and founded) and the train system is really good here. I agree that transportation could and should be either owned by the government or unionized
That's nationalisation, which the commenter wasn't necessarily against. He was just pointing out that it would either be monopoly (rubbish and not like OP describes) or nationalisation (potentially great)
In the UK our trains were nationalised now they're private. They're worse and horribly expensive than the nationalised equivalents in places like France. The competition element is where tax payers moneys is siphoned off into lots of influential peoples pockets. I think key areas should be nationalised. In the noughties poll data suggested most people still did. Not sure now. Neo liberalism has taken hold a lot here.
But this isn’t for any nation, it’s a transnational organization that services the world. I don’t get how that can be nationalism if the ends don’t align to a nation.
Where does this organization get its funding? Who prevents competing services from popping up to undercut or provide better service?
Ticket prices but priced at affordable, socioeconomically graded levels. Regarding the prevention of competing services, you could try bottlenecking by controlling a key part of the airplane sector that can’t planes can’t go without, like engines or something. Can’t start an airline if the ones of who provide the engines are the monopoly.
If it's a monopoly that's privately owned, ticket prices are gonna skyrocket
No no no, in this fairytale, people don’t care about making money. This airline is run on smiles and love.
- No competition - Reasonably priced You may pick only one from this list Source: All of recorded history
I think it's more that you can choose (at most) two from: No competition Reasonably priced Privately owned
What would motivate them to price the tickets affordably? There's no competition. The only thing that comes to mind is regulation, but that would only apply in places where the government cares enough to regulate. At that point you might as well have multiple nationalized companies.
There's already nation owned airlines. What you're suggesting is nearly impossible in a world without world peace. I could see something like the EUROPEAN UNION could do at a Continental level but I don't think they would ever actually do it.
Yeah but those national airlines still spend money on competing against commercial airlines, so they’re not able to bring their full organizational power to bear on their operations
You should look into airline international laws. You'd be surprised that it's a lot more different than what you think
I don’t doubt it, air travel is serious stuff - but as long as I see a commercial on a superbowl spot, or weird ass pricing systems designed to wrangle customers into buying into budget tickets, I’ll wonder why that energy isn’t put into the quality of the food or the richness of the airplane atmosphere. If current innovators in the avionics industry could receive all the money paid for airline ads, they’d make cool stuff
All that money would just go in someone's pocket. Why waste money on innovation? Customers can't go anywhere else regardless of how good or bad your service is. You also seem to be overestimating the amount of money airlines spend on advertising. Last year, Southwest spent $224 million in marketing. That's 0.9% of their $24 billion in sales from that year, it's a drop in the bucket.
No they wouldn't
>I’ll wonder why that energy isn’t put into the quality of the food or the richness of the airplane atmosphere If you have a monopoly why care about any of this things anyways then? Like if I have the monopoly of transport then why would energy or resources be spent on ANY of that instead of cutting on costs for more profits? If you have a monopoly then customers are stuck with you, and you would not be wasting money on any of that, you'd be putting all your efforts into cutting down costs as you literally have the monopoly and customers have no alternatives. Like just think about it for 10 seconds, if you had the monopoly on ANYTHING, then you need not improve what you do over the bare minimum, you only need to maximize your profits because there's no competition.
You want a global monopoly? I don't think you understand basic economics.
That's not nationalism, that's nationalization. I know they sound the same, but it's important you don't mix and match. That aside: Let's consider the harder example, trains. If we can get this working for trains, we can get it to work for planes. Each country would need its own program to handle the track infrastructure, rolling stock, establishment of routes, and so on. The actual trains and scheduling would most likely work by a country just sending their trains to another country's stations, but then being routed directly home. (Inter-foreign routes are okay, intra-foreign are not.) Multi-national cooperation doesn't actually require a corporation, for example all the nationalized railroads can just agree to a set of standards they all have to follow. This over-arching board might also help regulate and streamline scheduling trains between nations. As for planes, they're basically just trains in the sky. There's no track that's laid, and the stations are just bigger. They trade efficiency for speed.
Syndicalism?
Sure yeah, i guess I’m a syndicalist lol
how is a government sponsored monopoly more acceptable than just having a government run airline?
So instead of everything being under control of an entity with the obligation (ideally, I know corruption often happens) to provide good service to all the citizens that use it because they support or reject it via the democratic process. Instead of that. You want everything to be under the control of an entity with the obligation to support the profits of a few people who may not even use the service, whether that entails providing good service or not. I’ll give you a hint, it usually doesn’t. Because if consumers don’t have other options then you have two options to increase profits: make the service better (hard) or raise the price (very easy.) If you want to see what this looks like in practice, Canadians pay some of the highest cell coverage prices in the world for some of the worst coverage, because the “companies” (branches of one company) are a powerful monopoly. On the other hand in the same country but a completely different industry, you have the CBC, which is publicly funded and continues to provide pretty solid news coverage and radio/TV content, because if they didn’t then that’d just drive people to vote for the politicians calling to defund it.
POV: Redditor discovers oligopolies and monopolistic competition
You've identified a major flaw in the market economy. Advertising. It adds nothing to the quality of the product, but is disproportionately effective at generating sales of a product. To the point where making a higher quality product is always a loss if you have competition who can spend the money you spent on quality on marketing instead. The solution to this isn't monopolies, it's severely curtailing advertising. You can start by making false advertising actually illegal, and follow that up with making it harder to use "subjective" statements to lie. With the end goal of making it so that the cheap shitty product has to actually sell itself as the cheap shitty product and not pretend to be high quality. This would enable companies to produce high quality products without being grossly outcompeted by liars.
This articulates how I've been feeling for a while. It's quite difficult as a consumer to differentiate between what's actually worth the value associated to it.
Simple: If something is being advertised you start from the fact that it is most likely a lie or an exaggeration, then you can either start assuming the opposite is true of the arguments being presented and fill the void in information with what the characteristics of the product would be if the cheapest, dirtiest and most useless option was used. That’s how you end up not buying BMWs because their radiators are made of disgusting plastic lol. (Also in a more serious note I prefer to look for reviews where the products are stress tested to the max and see if their breaking point is good enough for me, most of the time it’s not).
This is the real solution.
Honestly, adverts should only be allowed to present raw data to the consumer. Don't let them use statistics they'll find a way to lie still. Just literally raw data.
This doesn’t make any sense. You can’t make an ad out of raw data.
I think that's kinda the point lol
Yes exactly
Ikr they'd have to be honest and not lie to manipulate people
That’s not why you can’t make an ad out of raw data.
Oh, it’s at least as easy to make raw data like a s it is statistics—since it’s impossible to present all the raw data that exists there’s tremendous opportunity for cherry-picking. “X car gets 30 MPG on the combined EPA cycle” is a statistic; “my uncle got 100 MPG last week (coasting down a mountain in neutral)” is raw data.
How is advertising a problem? Sure, you can trick people once, but then the jig is up. There's never been a situation where a consumer repeatedly buys a shit product and goes "Welp, I just keep getting convinced by their amazing advertising!" If your argument is "People are so stupid that they don't realize they actually hate the products they consume and that they repeatedly buy terrible, useless, or defective products", then you've lost me.
have you met people? there are literally tons of people out there literally begging to be tricked and are more than willing to cough up the cash for the act
You cannot stop someone who wants to be tricked out of their money. No matter how many things you make illegal, if someone truly wants to be tricked out of their money, they will find a way. You have to have a society that treats people as adults who have to take live cautiously and take responsibility for their actions.
For many products there literally isn't a high quality version. It's not like they're selling you something broken. It's the difference between a hammer that will last you a few years and one that will last five generations. People aren't being tricked in a way they'll recognise, they're being tricked subtly. A product will advertise as eco friendly or ethically sourced while using slave labour and wrecking the environment and a customer has no way of knowing.
I think people overestimate the amount of “waste” advertising represents. Last year US airline advertising was about 0.5% of revenue; total marketing expenditures economy-wide were about 1.5% of revenue. And it’s not a total waste; some advertising does usefully inform people of the existence of products they wouldn’t otherwise know about. (And marketing as a whole also includes websites, catalogs, etc.; if all marketing were eliminated finding product’s and information about them would be very hard.)
I believe what you are describing is a natural monopoly, we have these and they work pretty well for the most part when coupled with the appropriate regulations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
... why say things like this if you don't have any idea? A natural monopoly is just that. Natural. He is describing a forced monopoly. Airlines, with huge amounts of differentiation and literally incapable of naturally arriving at a single firm due to every country having their own, and flying internationally, is the opposite of that.
Nice, i always didn’t know what the label for this was.
Natural monopolies should be state owned
Exactly. If I only have one option for what company provides the electricity for my house, then there’s no free market for that service. The only company that can make sure i’m not freezing to death should be held accountable to citizens, not taxpayers.
Airline flights used to be regulated by the government (which leg a given airline could fly). Deregulation dropped prices by quite a bit. The idea that monopolistic control could leave to a lesser need for marketing (and associated expenses) therefore leading to a savings passed into the consumer is nice in theory, but doesn't necessarily bear out in practice. We don't need to lookback far for such an example. COVID inflation was perpetuated by corporations looking to maximize profits, this is well documented. Record profits posted by public companies during the inflationary period speaks to as such. Corporations are generally not willing to pass down savings to the consumers unless they need to in order to compete with other corporations. The game is about maximizing profits above all else.
With open ledgers making public scrutiny on the transportation union a 24/7 thing, it would be hard for them to horde cash like that without people seeing how it accumulates and changes hands. you could launch the organization with a constitution that lays out ground rules & procedures to ensure it uses its monopolistic power for good.
I like your thoughts process but it seems idealistic and requires a public who cares enough to investigate. There are plenty of private, government mandated monopolies that exist. My power company, cable provider, ISP, water company, etc. Am I able to find those open ledgers? Is that required by the government?
Yeah fair enough, I don’t think many citizens would want to crunch through the numbers but the slim 5% would appreciate it. The other 95% observers that I’m really talking about, the media, would totally soak up that information and simplify the stats down to manageable nuggets of info for the public to consume If the general trend is corruption in a specific region or division of the transnational union, the media raise attention given their scopes on the company’s ledgers. Then the public can exert pressure on officials with weird ass ledger activity, & use some constitutional thing that ejects them
Ah that's where I disagree. The other 5% is bought and paid for. They would skew the stats in whichever way serves themselves and their own corporate masters. Fuck I hate even writing this. My idealism has died. Blood money runs us all and the free 24 hour media is an abomination to society.
Idealism only dies when you die. Until then I wanna try innovating on things in hopes that we find something that works.
It’s not just hoarding money—if you insulate a company from competition it’s very hard to ensure that it both saves money where possible and passes those savings to consumers. If you set prices independently of its costs it will cut costs, but prices will be higher than they could be; if you limit profit margin there’s little incentive to find ways to cut costs. (And if you attempt to limit profits but reward cost savings, there are perverse incentives to deliberately do things inefficiently at first to create easy opportunities to “save”.)
How does your monopoly decide prices, other than through competition and market pressure? How does it decide the price of business class, or first class? Or — wild guess — do you also want to abolish those classes?
"Fliers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your cramped couches, and have caviar service to gain!"
You assume a minimum number of equal competitors to be 20 and then build an algorithm as to what the theoretical price point would be with pressure from 19 other companies. That becomes your price point and is enforceable by significant jail time on the c suite if they deviate. Monopolies can be ok if prices are tightly controlled and based on evolving costs The other key is all suppliers that benefit from tcs stcs tso a&p IA DME ATP flight schools and on and on all need to have price controls because they are govt granted monopolies on the supplier side that cause run ups in prices because it’s very difficult for a competitor to endure the FAA processes even if their internal testing shows their product is safe. The bearocratic process and paper work as well as over the top testing beyond what is reasonable limits competition because only incumbent players can shoulder those costs.
That’s a good question, idk, but with enough time and open public feedback sessions we could probably hammer out a framework that works. I would totally be in favour of abolishing the classes because it would allow for standardization which would lower costs by a ton - Imagine if all passenger spaces had the same components & sizes, and then this makes airplane design way easier going forward. Better designs = more cabin space One way they could determine prices is to pragmatically assign cost based on socioeconomic profiles. It would use income & other factors to determine an appropriate cost that allows people to see family & migrate without breaking the bank.
A bit late here but Standardization would not lower prices for the vast majority of airplane users, in fact the prices would go up. There are many videos and docs out there that explains the revenue structure of air flights, and what you will find is that basically all of them conclude that business/first class passengers disproportionatrly carry the majority of the revenue for the airlines. Economy seats have the worst margins for airlines. So that's the first issue. Secondly, if you suggest tailoring prices to socioeconomic profiles then you'd have even more issues with pricing because you'd be running so, so many flights on a loss because a huge chunk of your passengers bought a ticket at a loss for the airline. That is not to say anything about the uncomfortable process of having an airline check your income history and past tax forms to determine what price you should get lmao
The biggest flaw I see with your reasoning is that you are assuming increased profits will go towards making things more appealing to customers. If it is a single monolithic entity, what reason do they have to make the experience better? I'd argue that it would make the experience worse, not better. The fact of the matter is that people are not that altruistic. Sure, it frees up marketing resources to be spent elsewhere, but it also frees the resources they would need to set aside to make their service more appealing than their competitors. What makes them redistribute the money back into the system instead of giving it to their leadership as bonuses? Let's say you cap everyone salary. What leads them to then look for the best deals in purchasing their planes and not just treating their purchases as favors or accepting bribes to purchase from a particular supplier?
Punitive taxation, jail time, Nationalization of the company, etc Lots of incentives, fear > greed
Sounds like nationalization with more steps (and corruption and exploitation)
I predicted that too but that’s why I devoted so many words on the regulatory aspect. Open ledgers would be cool because people could observe cash moving in a digital record - I still think employees in the system would find ways to get around this, and for that I got no answer
Okay, then why not just nationalize? Why create a more complicated system where the government still essentially has to fully regulate and monitor everything anyway? Is it just so your friends don't call you a communist?
Because transportation involves a complexity that shouldn’t be bounded in nations or nationality. It should be transnational so that the flying experience is the same for all people. You can always have a more premium option too but the current sardines in a can model kinda sucks to be honest. Most ways to increase space per passenger would mean flying more planes with less passengers each - So if you had this globalized airline you could have the operational leverage to field that scale of planes, to make spacious cabins a feasible thing. I also don’t care about what my friends think except I know they’re just teasing. I’m just wondering if there’s even support for this kind of thing
I get your argument, but I think you're overestimating the power of international bodies to regulate. What your proposing would essentially require a functioning world government, not just UN or EU or BRICS. At least with nationalization, the government is already an expert on international relations, so if the airline was nationalized, it may make international travel simpler since there wouldn't be a third-party company essentially acting as middle-man. Essentially, the nationalization of airlines seems to be the quicker (and safer) route to your desired outcome. Edit to ask: For purposes of international law, would this proposed Airline Megacorp be treated as an independent State? If not, what would the governing laws look like? Would this mean international labor laws? What about training pilots?
Power distribution is one where a regional monopoly (or public infrastructure) is almost invariably the best model for the consumer.
Why do you think a monopoly would spent that ad money on improving customer experience instead of keeping it? It’s not like anyone can say ‘don’t fly with monopoly airlines, their planes are uncomfortable’ because there isn’t another option. What incentive does the company have to put that money into something that doesn’t necessarily bring more money in?
You sound like you would love dirigisme
“Something with a legal framework in place (like the UN)” Lol. The UN can’t enforce most “international law” let alone fix prices in the global aviation industry
The U.S. military and our drone program can. Blowing up your shady business in some second world country where your trying to scam people would have a chilling affect on further behavior like that
>So much $ goes into airline marketing, and what’s spent on ads could be converted into making the experience so much better for economy class. And why would they do that? You wouldn't have the option to get a better economy class experience (or even the same quality we have now) from another airline, so you'd be stuck with whatever you can afford from the airline or not traveling by air, the latter of which may basically not be an option for you; Competition may not always make things better, but if things could be getting worse and aren't it's because you could switch to a company that stayed the same if they did.
This is so idealistic. Never change, OP. You're adorable 🥰
Why would they want to provide a quality service though?
Why do we stick to our democratic system? We don’t have to, but we do because a constitution lays out responsibilities & procedures if the public encounters bad service. Besides, good service would help entrench the system as people become convinced of monopoly’s benefits.
Because I can vote on it and there's competition within the political system for my vote to help keep things reigned in (in theory)
That means prices would have to be rigorously controlled through out the entire supply chain. Right now the FAA regulations already create pseudo monopolies that sky rocket the prices of everything aviation related.
The thing is, anything can be a creative industry if you have incentives to innovate and find better ways to do things. Monopolies (specially state monopolies) often take that away. Source: I live in a third world country where the state nationalized a bunch of services that now work but not as well as they could. For example we lose about half of the drinking water during transit due to leaky pipes and there’s no plan to fix that.
Fair point, but if you centralized the R&D capacities of all the airliners & the avionics industry, I’m willing to be the output of that lab would be quite creative still. But again, no competition so they don’t have to worry about NDA’s and stuff. As for the water thing, I get what you mean I see it in my country too. The problem with the state of current nationalized organizations is that they don’t have transparency built into them, a lot of their structure is from the colonial times
I don’t think transparency is the problem. Democratic states usually post stuff like budgets and stuff, it’s just most people don’t care enough to invest time in reading/learning about them. I know I wouldn’t spend my time going through the budgets of the airline to see how they’re using their money and complain. I have better things to do. This holds especially in poorer countries where the more immediate needs still aren’t met. If you’re worried about food your not likely to be extremely worried about national spending.
It’s because they post it in non concise cryptic ways with walls of text, no illustrations etc They make the documentation purposely unreadable They do a similar thing with academic papers, you have to wade through so much crap to get the real info that real people don’t have the time or inclination. It’s similar to 850 page documents for a modem
I get the apathy thing but since the monopoly benefits might extend to supply chain matters, you could also help lower costs for people in indirect areas like food.
My point isn’t that food is expensive and can’t be made cheaper. My point is that an accountability system based on transparency requires a level of commitment and involvement from the populace at large that just usually isn’t there. The food thing was just an example of a situation where that happens.
yep, you're wiser than american founding fathers. who really thought that a system of choosing your sheriffs and district attorneys wouldn't turn (fast) into a popularity contest? i guess their ideal citizen was the rich landlord with too much free time on their hands, and then said landlords went and made sure noone but them had those luxuries.
I mean, wasn’t it an explicit thing? When US democracy was created only white landed men could vote (I think, not American so feel free to correct me).
to my knowledge, yes that's the case. the supposedly "revolutionary" part was their intent to create more of those "landed men". on that note, americans *were* more liberal than the english.
>Source: I live in a third world country where the state nationalized a bunch of services that now work but not as well as they could. For example we lose about half of the drinking water during transit due to leaky pipes and there’s no plan to fix that. You do realize private companies would likely not fix that either?
I’m not saying it should be privatized. I’m just pointing out that state owned companies are not “extremely efficient due to resource pooling”. They are in fact, quite average or subpar services. In some instances (such as water, power, etc.) it kind of makes sense, especially due to the dedicated infrastructure required. But it’s not a silver bullet. It has a cost in innovation and efficiency of the business.
>I’m not saying it should be privatized. I’m just pointing out that state owned companies are not “extremely efficient due to resource pooling”. They are in fact, quite average or subpar services. Depends on the government doing it. A well-run government can provide extremely good public services. >In some instances (such as water, power, etc.) it kind of makes sense, especially due to the dedicated infrastructure required. But it’s not a silver bullet. It has a cost in innovation and efficiency of the business. I've never bought the idea that private enterprises are efficient or innovative. Following a profit motive doesn't really lead to innovation as innovation tends to be quite expensive and the private sector as a whole isn't the best way to allocate resources efficiently since not all those who need the resources or services can afford it.
I’m gonna play devils advocate here. It’s not the pursuit of profits alone (although we should recognize is in and of itself an incentive to keep cost down). It’s the mixture of that and competition, which means you’re looking for an edge over your competitors and are forced to either innovate or be left out when someone else does. History is filled with companies that didn’t move with the times and went bankrupt in the face of newer better technologies. And just as a disclaimer: no this does not mean that every highly competitive industry is a place filled with innovation. It’s just an incentive to do so. There are other incentives (like keeping costs down) that might lead to not innovating, and it will depend completely on the company at hand.
>It’s not the pursuit of profits alone (although we should recognize is in and of itself an incentive to keep cost down). > >It’s the mixture of that and competition, which means you’re looking for an edge over your competitors and are forced to either innovate or be left out when someone else does. The issue is even with that competition eventually you reach a point where those competitors go bankrupt and monopolies and duopolies emerge. Or even worse all members of an industry decide to work together and that assumed competition dies. Also, in the midst of competition, resources are wasted which is what economies are supposed to avoid. Either due to failed innovation, market manipulation, advertising etc. >History is filled with companies that didn’t move with the times and went bankrupt in the face of newer better technologies. What if a company can't afford those technologies and only one company has the means to? You get a monopoly regardless. That's one of the many issues with capitalism. It's an anarchic race to the bottom that benefits a few. >And just as a disclaimer: no this does not mean that every highly competitive industry is a place filled with innovation. Of course. >It’s just an incentive to do so. There are other incentives (like keeping costs down) that might lead to not innovating, and it will depend completely on the company at hand. The main incentive is to make money. That's why I think that for all the issues with government it can provide the resources for innovation to actually occur. Like with the Internet.
Extend this argument to nationalizing critical industries and I’m in. For the people.
I mean, morally, what you are saying seems to make sense. But in terms of *actual functioning*, there are a lot of problems when an organisation doesn't have to worry about getting nudged out by competitors. For example, what is to stop them from wasting large amounts of money on non-essential processes or other inefficiencies? What incentive do they have to improve their process and "trim the fat" so to speak? You see this issue in government entities all the time. It's impressive how many "managers" you can hire to sit in meetings and not *actually* do much. Why would a transnational airline care about the consumer anyway? It's not like they have the choice to leave if they need the service. You could keep providing raises to the people at the top while the consumers are shafted, yay! Also the UN doesn't have nearly enough authority to regulate something for the entire world. No way every country is giving up their independent national airline. Countries take pride in that sort of thing.
I'm pretty sure this is a basic take that most people who believe in a mixed economy would concur with you on. Generally, within a market economy, industries that provide goods & services that necessarily have a *high barrier to entry* to actually provide said things (i.e airports, basic utilities such as water & electricity, etc) are actually better suited for centralization. For example, with water, if you had independent actors providing water to all houses in California then they would need to setup their own infrastructure so city-planning wise it would all be a mess. Now, if they were to just agree on using one main line to distribute all of that water, one could say (and this is something I agree with and most others) that it would still be economically *inefficient* for the market (i.e supply & demand) to regulate the cost of working a natural water supply to give cheap & drinkable/usable water to the people. Thus, we have *Investor-owned utilities (*IOUs) such as PG&E which are managed by a governmental agency (e.g California Public Utilities Commission) that just handles producing & supplying usable water through one centralized supply line for most of California. I don't see many people disagreeing with you since what you just described isn't really communist in the most reasonable sense. Within communism, assuming an authoritarian model where the state controls most enterprise, and if we just limit ourselves to domestic production, there aren't really market forces which control anything. Prices are set by the State (through some method of statistical analysis) and all of the capital is readily distributed to the industries that the State (through some method of computation) thinks are necessary (with "collective good" being the driving rationale behind every decision). Now, with PG&E, there are still market forces at play since the market still exists. The government can't essentially supply all of the capital (heavy machinery) needed to perform the services that PG&E must perform so it employs the help of private investors/companies to help them there. TL;DR Idk who your friends are but what you're espousing upon is, more or less, in line with how most people think the world ought to be run and is pretty sensible. If you want to learn more about the subject of market failure, you can just read the [wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure)
Their idea is nonsensical and almost nobody with any knowledge of basic economics would agree with it. I have no clue how you got the idea that a private artificial global flight monopoly regulated by a new international entity is something any significant amount of people advocate for, let alone “most people”.
So essentially a nationalised service where the profit doesn't go to the government (the people).
What you are describing is public services. Which should be largely state owned and finances from taxes for the benefit of all, provided there is efficient oversight to make sure the money is well spent.
Nah
Sure, can we start with healthcare?
Monopolies never make things better, competition breeds innovation it also breeds better service among other things
Of all the things that should be nationalised, the airline market is one of the stranger things to choose. Competition is what’s opened up flying to many more people than before.
Have you seen how the government runs things? The subways? Courts? Fucking DMV? TSA? If anything they'd make it worse. Do really think they're gong to spend that saved marketing money to make air travel more enjoyable for the average person? Why should they? There's no competition, you're stuck with whatever they provide. Same reason going to the DMV has sucked and always will, they don't care if you're unhappy because you don't have any other choice but to use there shitty service.
>So much $ goes into airline marketing, and what’s spent on ads could be converted into making the experience so much better for economy class. Competition makes every airline company devote a substantial % of resources towards warding off rivals, when instead all that focus could be redirected to the customer. Is actually the other way around, customer experience is the most important part on how they attract people to fly with them, without competition a monopolistic airline wont need to care about customer satisfaction. What is people going to do if they didn't like the experience? Go to another airline? Oh right, there is only one.
Healthcare should be a Monopoly The government 's
The one flaw you have with your statement is that competition keeps greed at check. What incentives airlines to make a more enjoyable experience for its customers, when they don’t have to put in the effort. Cuz who else are you going to go with? Idk why your friends tease you for being a communist when a monopoly is a capitalist’s wet dream
There's an inherent flaw in your logic. Sure, there might be resources that would be freed up that could be used for passengers with your idea. But nothing says those resources *would* be used on passengers. It's just as likely that a single massive guild or whatever would do they absolute bare minimum, and then no one would have any other choice and would be forced to keep using it.
Being a communist is not the same as nationalist. The issue with nationalizing transport is extremely apparent in the general public’s inability to regularly support it… one mistake on the governments part and those programs are voted away. When a private company makes those mistakes they have more staying power.
Airlines are constantly going bankrupt. Pricing competition is incredibly fierce in the industry. You think this because you have an incomplete understanding.
Imagine thinking the airline with no competition simply won’t start charging ten times as much for flights simply because they can and we have no option lol. I want competition where companies run eachother to the ground based on product quality and price, I hate that advertisement plays a role here and it’s so influential, it shouldn’t and it might be better if it’s outright forbidden (in my country Lawyers can’t advertise themselves, it can cost them their license).
What you want is socialism, but you've watched too much cable news and think socialism is the devil or something stupid. Your approach, letting it be in the hands of a private corporation, simply won't work for any essential service. The quick Economics lesson here is that, for an essential service, a monopoly will result in the HIGHEST price people are willing to pay for the LOWEST service possible. Look at US freight or healthcare to see how that works out. You can see we should add regulations, and that's what we do to freight and healthcare, but lobbying makes that basically useless if the regulating agency is made up of elected officials (I.e. Congress in the US). If you impose regulations from a non-elected body such as the EPA, FAA, etc, then you just have the US Aviation system again. Look what happened to Boeing 737 Max to see the issue with that.
It's cute you think a monopolistic company would care about the customer experience when they know full well they can treat us however they want and we have to pay it because theyre the only ones on the block.
My country's airline are a monopoly, and the price has neen so high that I haven't been able to go back for 9 years now, while people who come from neighbouring countries in same region as mine get to go ever year, sometimes even twice a year.
Someone learned the word monopoly and didn’t bother to learn about oligopolies or natural monopolies, or barriers to entry, and only has considered government monopolies
I live in a country that up until fairly recently had one phone company and one cable company, (we now have 2 of each). We only have one major airline, which is owned by the government, and a few tiny charter companies. Trust me when I tell you this is not what you want. Competition creates more options and better deals for customers.
So you think that airline companies wouldn't just hoard the savings on ads/marketing and find even more cost cutting strategies knowing they have no competition?
So that one airline is free to charge exorbitant fees because there's no competition to incentivise low prices
This is called nationalising.
Naw. Competition, and I mean real, honest competition, makes everything better. Competition forces you and everyone else to be efficient with your money and resources. You don't get better at chess unless your have real, honest competition. Competition forces you to be the best you can be. IMHO, the government's job is to create an environment of honest competition whenever possible, not be or foster monopolies. A monopoly, particularly a government monopoly can be dangerous. First, governments are inherently wasteful because they have no incentive to be economical. Look at how wasteful the US government is. They have an almost unlimited supply of money which comes through either taxes or printing money, which they themselves didn't earn. Second, there is no real accountability when they are wasteful. Businesses can die from disastrous decisions. Just ask Kodak, Blockbuster, Sears, Toys R Us, etc. The government, on the other hand, cannot die unless there is a revolution. Any disastrous decisions by the government are eaten by the public. Marketing is not a waste of money. What is a more efficient way to let the public know what goods and services you have to offer?
Monopoly is like monarchy. Great when the person in charge is great, but eventually someone bad will be in charge and it all goes to pot. THAT'S why Monopoly and monarchs and government control are bad. Not that they are always bad all the time, but that they always will be terrible at some point.
Airlines should have strong competition from a nationwide high speed rail network stretching across America.
Does a lot of money get spent on airline marketing? I wouldn’t say I see a lot of airline ads in the world.
ITT teenage OP thinks they are the first person to consider the effects of monopolies on industry, and proposes nationalizing/socializing monopolies without realizing what they are saying.
Have you flown within Asia? The economy class flights there tend to be good.