Were you born into a world with electricity naturally occurring in sockets?..

They still run on public roads.

I'm all for multiple city bus operators.

It's not really devil's advocate, it's the way Capitalism should be structured. If we had government covered health care I'd expect private markets of vanity surgery or uncovered procedures to still exist. If we had government run utilities you'd still have private installments for demanding needs, generators, off-grid construction, etc, etc.

A bus isn’t a natural monopoly. A subway system is.

then that's not a natural monopoly and not a good example of what is being discussed.

> To play devils advocate, in NYC which has a massive transit network. There exists a series of private transit "companies" (sometimes just a guy with a 10 person van), that provides routes that are poorly served by the publicly run transit network.

Are they part of the regular fare structure?

> to those who want to buy the world

Oh, they don't need to buy it, they already inherited from their rich parents. The world is just a set of trading cards to them at this point.

Elon Musk's fake money could buy a new $10 million mansion every single day--every single day--for THREE CENTURIES, and he wants more!

Society is delusional. We can't even collectively agree to tax psychotic money-grubbers who cannot even enjoy the fake wealth they have their names on.

> governments also defer maintenance on the infrastructure; especially since you mention roads and transit

Roads are the outliers here because governments usually have direct oversight on them. They are more infrastructure rather than utilities.

Unlike roads, everything else discussed here (electricity, water, sewage, transit), even when public, is operated by a public company, not the government. Maintenance is part of the company's operating costs and is accounted for in the price consumer pays. And while there is no competition for reliability, there's also no obligation to maximize profits for the shareholders.

> good maintenance is not a given regardless of private ownership or government ownership.

Its not about maintenance, its about pure math and efficiency.

Natural monopolies have 0 advantage in terms of price discovery, therefore there are no market forces. And you get all the disadvantages of a monopoly without any of the advantages of capitalism.

Many purely capitalist countries still advocate for natural monopolies to be goverment run (Norway oil being public, Singapore owning all the land and housing, Spain having public healthcare) and all of those examples beat countries that have privately owned natural monopolies.

Consumer choice, or public good/public utility: Choose one.

A deregulated market should provide choice, if it provides monopoly the gov should step in either by breaking up (forcing choice) or making public (forcing good).

I think there's some examples of a split model that work well, i.e. the grid is publicly owned but the retail functions such as metering, billing, and service connections are private and have competitive providers.

That doesn't follow though.

If I am not mistaken, government gives tax breaks or subsidies to induce private firms to enter the market and build capacity.

The only reason investors are building capacity today, is because the demand for data centers is projected to go up.

What happened at the start of electricity, is different from what happened when it was to scale. The nature of the good decides what the most efficient form of production is advisable.

You really don’t get to choose where your power comes from though and pge owns the lines. Paying another org is just throwing money away.

Power generation is easy to be competitive though.

thats the government

My state deregulated natural gas which meant that despite the city owning the delivery and turning on and off the gas each for profit company had to have their own HQ, marketing budget, customer service, sales team, and C-suite.

The fixed service fee cost $40/month which was more than the natural gas consumed every month but Jan/Feb. They also make cancelling difficult, I was put on hold for 40 minutes without an music so I didn't know if I had been disconnected or was just on hold.

Electric is run by one company and their service fee is $15/mo. Their customer service is also much better.

I think at this point, the counter argument to private enterprise is "Hey, China did it".

(I am aware that this is a facetious statement, and the main point you are aiming to make is that there are other factors that matter.)

> While the power itself is the perfect example of the opposite, where the market should (according to theory at least) be perfect.

Markets don’t seem to want to solve for outlier situations like extreme weather events or significant hardware malfunctions. Basically I’m talking about what happened in Texas. When it’s a safety issue, it can be hard to align incentives to make planning for outliers worthwhile to market actors.

> While the power itself is the perfect example of the opposite, where the market should (according to theory at least) be perfect.

Nome, it only works for fossile-based power, for any other power source (be it hydro, nuclear, solar, geothermal or wind) the marginal cost of supply is zero and all the cost is upfront cost. In that situation, the (classical economics) market equilibrium simply doesn't exist mathematically.

Transmission is privately owned and operated but publicly controlled. Like other natural monopolies, the regulator tells the operator what to provide and how much they get paid for it.

The main reasons for this arrangement are political -- debt stays off the government's balance sheet, and labour disputes aren't "the government's fault".

That works in theory. In practice each company has their own overhead which increases their service fees.

They regulated nat gas in my state and the service fee is more than the gas consumed.

for liquid markets, the evidence for this is quite good.

i think it is beyond clear that some of you all have never worked in federal government to have such a rosy outlook

And as unconvincing as "government is inefficient" in this case

Yes but the governments sole purpose isn’t to return infinite profits to shareholders………….

Capitalist using money to buy capital and then sell services, brilliant.

Government using money to buy capital and then provide services, deadly socialism.

It's always just been about capitalists wanting less competition. That's why they don't want the market to decide and fight for laws to literally outlaw stuff like municipal broadband. If they are so much more efficient, they should be able to offer an equal or better service for the same or better price.

> The moment a company goes public they're legally required to make stupid, short-term decisions that are worse for everyone

Nope there's no legal requirement. Management is happy for you to believe there is because they get paid in stock.

The only legal requirement is to make decisions that are in the shareholders' interests, rather than the management's. That means short-term-bad, long-term-good decisions are actually strongly encouraged.

The fact that companies are organized the way they are today is not some fact of natural law. There are legal structures of ownership that have been put in place by real people, which means there are the means to completely change those ownership structures.

Allowing outside shareholders in combination with private ownership is going to result in the kinds of short term thinking that lead to the "exits" and other profit-maximizing behaviors.

One "way out" is to make laws that give good public incentives / allow people to easily incorporate as organizations where the employees are the sole owners of the entity (co-op).

> The moment a company goes public they're legally required to make stupid, short-term decisions that are worse for everyone

FWIW this is a myth.

There needs to be regulation that discourages the behavior. Some ideas that have been floated include expanding corporate responsibility to include the workers and customers, loosening corporate responsibility laws so that companies don't have strong obligation to its shareholders, ending quarterly earning reports, reviving the ban on stock buybacks, etc.

No, because shareholders are the owners of the company. The legal requirement is more a fail safe than a mandate, because obviously the company wants to act in the best interest of the company. Without the legal mandate these companies would still almost universally act the same.

There are laws that a plumber can't come into your home and smash up your pipes. That law however is not the thing that prevents the plumber from doing that, the plumber naturally works in your common interest. It's the exact same with companies, shareholders elect a board who hires specialists to run the company. Notice the shareholders are at the top.

"Shareholder value" is just another way of saying return on capital. Do you want to reduce return on capital? (the answer could be yes or no, just advancing the discussion)

Or do you want to redistribute the ownership of capital?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Stock_Exchange perhaps

> Is there any way out of this "shareholder value" hell? The moment a company goes public they're legally required to make stupid, short-term decisions that are worse for everyone, even the shareholders?

Shareholder value (primacy) is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

There are others:

* “Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.” ― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III

* “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[72] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics

If you back to the mid-1900s US:

> In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”

* https://law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-history...

Or further:

> American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm.

* https://repository.law.umich.edu/mbelr/vol9/iss1/2/

The idea that it is some kind of 'legal requirement' is also a myth:

* https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/771/

This behavior may have started with Dodge v. Ford.

tl;dr Ford wanted to invest profits back into Ford company and Dodge forced them in court to pay dividends instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

> Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than for the benefit of his employees or customers.

> The moment a company goes public they're legally required to make stupid, short-term decisions that are worse for everyone, even the shareholders

The problem is a lot of companies functionally behave that way but there actually isn’t a mandate resembling anything like this, though it’s repeated so often I’m not surprised a lot of people it’s the case. Fiduciary duty doesn’t translate to “rip up and sell everything that isn’t nailed down, burn all your goodwill, and squeeze the shit out of everyone so you can extract every red cent as fast as humanly possible.” You are allowed to plan for the long-term. We just don’t and we create all sorts of incentives (bonus structures for instance) to chase short-term gains.

The investors aren’t going to rise up in all their fury and haul off a CEO to be guillotined because he invested in a project that spans more than a quarter. But unfortunately, plenty of businesses love operating as if that’s the case, because it gives an excuse to make quick dirty money. So they hide behind this erroneous perception of what constitutes “fiduciary duty.“ In the US’s particular form of capitalism it makes a lot of sense, even if it’s terrible for us as a whole.

Utilities have made $200B+ in profit since 2021, new report says - https://www.utilitydive.com/news/utilities-have-made-200b-in... - March 17th, 2026

Paying for Their Profits: How Ratepayers Foot the Bill for Soaring Utility Profits - https://energyandpolicy.org/utility-profit-report/ - March 12th, 2026

- Some utilities consistently operate at significantly higher margins than the average. The top 10 utilities by average margin over 2021–2024 include MidAmerican Energy (27.22%), Florida Power & Light (23.51%), Nantucket Electric (23.24%), Empire District Electric (22.45%), Florida Public Utilities (20.35%), CalPeco (20.28%), Public Service Electric & Gas (19.44%), Duke Energy Carolinas (19.07%), Alabama Power (18.71%), and AEP Texas (18.63%).

In the Georgia (US state, not country) there is one investor owned utility (Georgia Power) that is regulated like you mention by the state. They have to get rates and new plants and basically everything approved by the state Public Service Commission. We'll set aside how the PSC is basically a captured regulatory agency, but in theory they are highly regulated and don't just get to do what they want. GPC serves about little more than half the state's population, and about a quarter of the physical land mass

The rest of the state is served by either local cities with their own utilities or cooperatives. The cooperatives are not government agencies, they are privately owned non-profit corporations whose customers are the owners. These companies aren't regulated by the state PSC and have the ability to set their own rates unilaterally. The only regulation they have is that they report their rates to the PSC, but it's just a report, no approval

Technically they're almost all subject to regulation by the US Government as a condition of taking loans in the 30s/40s (and most of them have rolled that financing over and continue to use it to finance operations even today) but for the most part that regulation just says they have to at least charge enough to cover their interest, and can't sell their systems without the feds' approval

They could raise rates as much as they want, but the structure of a customer-owned company like that is the profits just get redistributed back to the customers, so there's no reason or incentive to do so

And, FWIW, that 23% number from the linked article is about right. GPC is usually 15-20% higher than most of the coops and city-owned systems in Georgia (there are some that are higher). And this is even with some of those coops and cities actually buying power wholesale from GPC

Rate of return issue, and how the current bond market activity and yield curve plays into this, is covered in https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-the-federal-reserve-s...

As interest rates go up, investor owned utilities increase their rate of return on equity ask, pushing up consumer electricity prices. A baseline of consumer electric demand is inelastic, and required for life.

How are roads maintained and upgraded?

"Taxpayers" are the public.

The infrastructure is for the public.

Why shouldn't the public get to pay for its own infrastructure without a middleman trying to make a buck?

Huh? Profits are outside capital improvements. That is the nature of profits. There are arguments for private utilities but this one makes no sense.

> electricity is electricity. Water is water.

except its completely not:

electricity has stability, availability during peak loads, robustness under inclement weather etc.

Water has purity, safety, and flavor. (Austin water in the fall tastes like leaves :gross:)

Removing the rent-seeking middle-man class generally brings in savings. Same with healthcare.

Also the "refs" should be in charge. That is to say the working class are the refs and they should be able to build infrastructure without the capital owning class inserting itself as a rent-seeker between them and these services.

The way I understand it in my country is this:

There is only one public water system, every house connects to it. The state tasks specific companies with its maintenance (these are often not utility providers themselves, just construction/maintenance companies).

Consumers attached to that system have a metered connection, but water just flows as long as there's enough overall. Your utilities company doesn't have to move any physical water at all. They just have to eventually "settle" the amount of water that they sold to their customers. They do so by buying and then forwarding options contracts. The electricity and gas companies are the same. They compete on

- trading (who knows best when to buy how much?) and

- consumer-facing marketing

This is how a lot of the modern economy works. Through the power of abstraction, you can run an online store without producing or shipping any items yourself and a delivery restaurant without cooking any meals.

I imagine this works just like with electricity. You have generation capacity, with commercial entities buying or owning generation capacity and selling the resource to consumers through community owned last mile infrastructure. The sellers need to tally up and reconcile/settle their generated capacity at some frequency (not sure if daily, monthly, yearly).

Alberta is one of the more expensive provinces for electricity, and the average is around 20 cents per kwh as of March 2026 according to federal government:

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...

Which also has this quote: "In Alberta, where electricity is supplied through a competitive retail market, residential prices tend to be slightly higher and more variable over time compared with most other provinces."

6 cents per kwh! Can we set up some shipping back and forth for batteries, you charge them, I pay you for it and can have cheaper energy.

This is about what we pay here for delivery back to the grid, yes pay, not earn, they don't want our solar, we have too much (yes we can turn them off, and we do).

Isn't power production and rates a provincial concern?

Why in the world would the cost of electricity be a factor in wanting to separate federally by anyone with the slightest amount of brain tissue?

I wonder how much higher electricity costs would be without natural gas, fracking and nuclear.

Nobody forced Germany to shut down their nuclear plants. The US even warned them not to do it for over a decade. Obama and Merkel had a joint press conference where Merkel assured everyone that Germany had a "10 to 15-year plan". The Biden administration even sanctioned German companies building Nordstream 2 because it was a Russian geopolitical project that would be weaponized against them.

Well we see how that turned out.

I meant "Efficient" as in delivering the power for less cost. Investors don't necessarily care about a profit margin either. Space X is a trillion dollar company and has 0 profit.

rent seeking middleman? I would say the government has the most special privileges of the competitors in the market no?

We have the most expensive healthcare in the world and some of the worse it is a over regulated industry full of complexity and corruption. Look at industries without government involvement, the less involvement the cheaper and better things get.

healthcare, education, and child care all suck.

tvs, software, and clothes, all cheap and very good.

I love this chart: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Turns out energy is getting more expensive, especially when places like the US aren't diversifying their energy and are relying on dead dino juice.

You can. It is just that the costs of pipes (wires) are so high that you can't both charge a reasonable price and pay for the pipes. This is why most farms are on private wells - $10k to drill a well is cheaper over 50 years than pipes to each farm. (Many Iowa farms are on public water not a well because wells in those parts tend to not produce enough water for a house's need - and they pay a lot of money per month to pay for those pipes)

This is why we say utilities are a natural monopoly. If you have the pipes/wires in place and even a little paid off you can undercut and competitor until they are bankrupt.

Even if there is only one set of pipes under the street, the owner of those pipes is constrained from acting in a predatory way if the market is free. They are disciplined by potential competition (if prices too high or lets the water quality drop, it suddenly becomes financially viable for a competitor to dig a rival pipe, or set up localized system, or offering water trucking to your site).

Under a government-granted monopoly, that threat is legally banned (except for maybe water trucking)

This guy thinks waste in government is only 15%.

At the low end, the GAO estimates of federal spending, 3-7% is fraud, 3% is improper payments, 7-10%+ is legal but wasteful (e.g. zombie programs) - totaling 13-20%.

In the middle, DOGE (don't smite me, just citing multiple sources) estimated 30-33% was waste.

And at the high end, the American public according to Gallup polling perceives 59% to be waste. https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-say-federal-govt-wastes-...

> Privatization supporters seem to always use waste as a boogeyman, but never the inevitable profitmaxxing for management and shareholders

That’s because under capitalism, waste and inefficiency are touted as the ultimate evil. Making profit is the entire purpose of the whole system, so it’s inherently good, and “the right thing”.

Especially in the US, even talking about a reduction in profit is akin to blasphemy, and quickly gets one labeled a quack.

That’s roughly the opposite of the development of electric utilities in the US. The IOUs owned dense urban areas and refused to electrify further out. It was only the rise of public municipal utilities that got them to go to the states, implement the regulatory compact, be granted rate of return, etc., and then they began building out more.

Some of it goes to bonuses and dividends, but 23% is a really big number.

I think a big part of that number is risk, dividends are tied to risk too.

The very idea of investing is that you take risks in exchange for profits. That is, if it fails, you lose your capital, if it succeeds, you become richer. A public provider doesn't work the same way, risk is covered by taxpayer money. If it fails, taxpayers foot the bill, if it succeeds, cheaper service.