No need for an opinion tag if you're spitting straight facts
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Had privatization ever worked out? Like, ever?
I was talking to someone about this very same postal issue, and his example was DHL. "Privatization turned them around! They're now an international company!!!"
Why the fuck does canada post need to be competing internationally? Just deliver the mail and have a gov't presence in small towns to provide other services.
Just spend the money to service canadians... It doesnt have to be profitable nor an international competitor
Also, DHL sucks...
Had privatization ever worked out? Like, ever?
Yes. It works out really nicely for our oligarchs.
I was trying to think of a single example where it made the service better and I legitimately can't?
Privatization of liquor in Alberta has worked out amazingly well. Booze is cheaper and there's a liquor store every 100 meters, some open well past midnight. It's an alcoholic's dream.
I mean to an alcoholic in the small scale it sounds like it's working out great.
But Canada's recently done a study that shows the taxation gained from alcohol sales is less than half of what it costs to address the deleterious effects of alcohol consumption.
Effectively the government loses money on every bottle it raxes.
Beer in Alberta is far more expensive than in any other province
TIL Alberta had state run liquor stores. I'll have to read about those when I get home.
Same with auto insurance, if you're a responsible driver. I've lived in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan among other places the last 25 years, and Alberta is consistently far cheaper for auto insurance, if you shop around. A lot of people close to the AB border on the sask side do a little light fraud and pretend to live at their brothers house in alberta
Because it is never the service that privatization seeks to make better. Private corporations make more money. That is the only target metric.
Depending on the market, providing better service is what makes you more money, and a malaise creeps in about management not caring about that anymore when government ran. Besides, all my packages come by Purolater now, a private company owned by Canada Post that doesn't seem to go on strike. They literally own their own competition and it's profitable.
So, the capitalist brainrot belief is that Adam Smith's invisible hand is going to make sure that money only goes to the people who deserve it, because people obviously will buy the best product at the cheapest prices and everyone else deserves to be pushed out of the market unless they do better.
Except we have consistant evidence that that isn't true. The raw existence of marketing and advertising completely undermines the core concept of what is supposed to make private business good. "We'll just make sure we're the name people know and appeal to their cultural wants" is a complete subversion of how businesses are supposed to function. And then there's the reality that once businesses have reliabily built themselves into the cultural needs of people, they don't need to care anymore: see the process of enshitification in the mass of new business concepts - streaming services, 2nd party food deliver apps, etc. - and this becomes obviously true.
On paper, providing a better service should result in higher income. In reality, there are a million manipulatable factors to undermine this concept, and as we continue to argue that wealth is an inherent virtue, we'll continue to give perceived moral superiority to the private businesses that will pull the plug on your grandmother's life support if it will save them a dollar. Fuck that. The more services we can keep our of the hands of greedy CEOs and venture capitalists, the closer we are to a genuinely just world.
This is a very long winded way to admit the existence of gullible and foolish people
So "gullible and foolish people" deserve to be abused by corporate interests? We aren't supposed to build a world that benefits everyone, regardless of how "gullible and foolish" they are?
Yeah. The rich go from funding it as a service, via their taxes, to making income off of it, via dividends. Everybody wins!
So long as you're only counting the rich.
It works for politicians who do the usual sleight-of-hand around "fiscal responsibility," and for the eventual shareholders.
There are some examples in places like Russia where things like the privatization of the food system has led to more options for citizens, but it was a rough transition and much of the privatization just ended up in more corrupt systems.
@BlameThePeacock @shani66 To add to this. The privitization of the Dutch energy market did drive down costs for the consumers.
It worked.
Untill the war in Ukraine. That wiped out any consumer gains and then some as we got hit with the full force of the exploded gasprices.
Steve Boots has some good videos discussing the whole ordeal. Highly recommend him to fellow left-leaning Canadians. He's a former teacher and has managed to teach me far more than I ever hoped to learn on my own.
Some things make financial sense but not in a national security, social security, or unity sense. Privatizing utilities generally falls into one of those categories. I was arguing with my brother once about privatizing the local telco and he said it wasn't profitable. I responded with, "So? It never had to be profitable." There were certainly problems with it, and the expense was one of them, but it hasn't really gotten much cheaper after privatization, although a lot of people who could afford to buy stocks made a lot of money. And don't ask why, when our company was converted to publicly traded, we all didn't get stocks in it. Saying that out loud just proclaims it for the money grab it was.
Can I ask why package delivery should be a public service?
I can understand making things with inelastic demand like healthcare a public service, or natural monopolies like cell phones, but do amazon package deliveries need to be government funded?
Public services are also required when providing a service to service level expectations wouldn't be profitable otherwise. We expect and demand that the post office deliver to every remote outpost in the country for whom there is no alternative, regardless of expense. Those deliveries could be anything, including something like medication. If you privatize it, a private company would immediately and naturally cut loose those unprofitable routes.
So in that way, it is an awful lot like healthcare. If you consider postal service a right, then it's functionally no different.
Because it makes the country a better place to live.
Shipping via Canada Post has not improved my life one bit over using other companies.
You're essentially taxing people for a convenience. You could do the same with streaming services, gyms, and all manners of things.
You could do the same with streaming services, gyms, and all manners of things.
Yes I agree!
Why stop there? Clean water is a convenience isn't it? What about fire departments? That's a convenience. People could do these things on their own. They should be rugged individualist and always take care of themselves right? Why do we need roads? People should just pave their own roads right?
Why stop there? Clean water is a convenience isnβt it? What about fire departments? Thatβs a convenience. People could do these things on their own. They should be rugged individualist and always take care of themselves right? Why do we need roads? People should just pave their own roads right?
I believe water is done privately, as are utilities. Roads are obviously difficult to do when managing the various tolls, and eminent domain, an issue package delivery would never run into. Fire department I think you'd run into issues with housing density, given you can just let peoples house burn down without affecting others.
But I can understand the desire I suppose, I just feel like we are subsidizing private corporations. I'd at least like a law that required it was free shipping only for Canadian companies or maybe Canadian product.