The Profit Problem

A very simple one this.

"What's good for capitalism is bad for the purchaser".

That's the simplest I can boil it down to.

If profit is the main motive of any business transaction, then extracting the most money from the payee is the goal.

It's bad enough if you're an individual on a budget trying to get by. You may have seen some of my early posts on the junk we all get sold at "low, low" (actually as high as we can get away with it) prices. If you keep your wits about you, you'll notice these days it's actually only a percentage of goods at the supermarket that are actually cheap. If you wanted to stretch your money as far as possible, you can often find cheaper deals for specific items in local pet centres, hardware stores, butchers, veg stalls, even sometimes in the corner shop. No I'm not saying everything they sell is cheaper. But certain items often are.

So your ideal shopping route in the UK (cost wise) would now involve darting around all local shops and the supermarket, then buying up what you actually wanted at the best deal from each shop. Not going to happen is it?

I'm getting distracted. I just hate the supermarket model. It doesn't provide nearly as much locally recycled income and work. I digress ...

Privatisation. That was my point.
There's an insane view that privatising things makes them somehow more efficient. In one very narrow term of the word efficient this is true. They become efficient at maximising profit. It doesn't automatically make them any safer, faster, easier or anything that might actually matter to the end consumer "efficient".

This somehow seems to have got extended to a capitalism v socialism argument. Socialist want unions and the state running things, capitalists believe the free market can do a better job.

Hang on a minute. If we are talking about a provision that can be opened up to multiple effective competing companies, then yes, ok, we can argue capitalism might do a good job. Trouble is there are very few examples of this actually happening in the real world. When it comes to things like railways, electricity, water, gas, phone lines, one of two things tends to happen ...

You either get entirely false competition (say UK railways here) and replace unions with incredibly limited providers subsidised and in bed with the government interests in making profit. OR ... You get something like the current UK electric provider farce which manages to get what should be opposing companies collaborating behind the scenes on price setting for mutual profit.

The problem isn't state funding / union power vs free market capitalism. The problem is effectively controlling either solution to prevent profiteering at the expense of the consumer.

The kicker? If you want to go the free market way, you have to invest in a government funded and effective regulation system. I don't mean the jokes we have like offcom, the PCC, the IPCC, even HMRC Tax Offices! They all get cut back to a point where they are inefficient an unable to control the sector they are supposed to, or find it's easier to get by jumping in bed with the sordid crew they are supposed to be monitoring.

Free market solutions come with a cost that free market idealists are not willing to pay.

State provided solutions come with the exact same problems .. but at least you're removing one step in the profit chain of pain to the end user.

What it keeps coming back to is ... motive for profit, either in a state funded or free market system is the killer. Greed. Money. Unreasonable earnings for what eventually becomes sub-standard provision.

As a species, we don't yet seem to have a way round that.
Once again I seem to find myself in a lonely place watching most of humanity arguing about socialism v capitalism, and shouting in to the wind .. "Guys? It's greed and corruption screwing us up whichever way we do it!"