If you had the power to make the laws however you wanted around universally needed basic services of electricity, gas, water, sewage, how would you do it?
Non-profit? Government run? Capitalism with minimal regulation? Capitalism with strict regulation? Profit caps? “Common carrier” type of deal to allow any player to compete in an energy market, trying to stop behemoth entities from monopolistic?
Very curious to hear from the non-US audience.
Personally, I lean towards gov run services for universal needs, like healthcare, electricity, heating, etc. But I am guessing the outcomes of whatever energy policy/regulations is the average of how the rest of society is doing.
American perspective, but how about running them like the USPS?
I don't know the intricacies, but from what I've gathered, the USPS is operated by the government and intended to teeter right around the line of self-sustainability. They're required to provide service to "hard-to-scale" regions, like the middle-of-nowhere rural towns in Montana, without charging them an arm and a leg. This works, because their primary directive is not to "make stock go up", but rather to "get the job done and the mail delivered".
In Japan utilities are separated into pseudo-governmental entities that operate the infrastructure as a monopoly, and for-profit companies that deal directly with customers. This seems to work relatively well in that the customer-facing companies can distinguish themselves in the market (e.g. offering higher prices but better customer service), and the infrastructure is immune to profit incentives but subjected to high levels of regulation.
The closest equivalent I experienced in the states is when I lived in the SF bay area and got internet access as a customer of Sonic, who provided DSL services over copper lines owned by AT&T.
Spanish here. IMO all those services should be state owned. Set them with a tariff-free base monthly consumption and start charging beyond that threshold.
I'm ok with private companies providing the service to the state, if they think they can do it more efficiently and with fair pay to their workers. And, short leases, no more than 3 year contracts. But the current scenario, where most of the services are effectively privatized, is awful, expensive, inefficient and corrupt.
This gets regulatory captured/lobbied away over by monied interests.
>Profit caps?
This is simply a subset of "capitalism with strict regulation". Implementing profit caps in a manner without loopholes takes detailed regulations and a judicial branch that strictly enforces them. This too will get regulatory captured/lobbied away over time.
Another issue with this is that ironically a proper implementation of this would receive even more pushback than nationalization. Why? Because you have to cap e.g. shareholder returns, otherwise it introduces awful incentives, as we're seeing with this exact case where there's a "profit margin % cap". You'd also need exec compensation caps.
I do have a relatively straightforward idea for this, though I'm sure there are holes in it that I haven't thought of - market cap growth caps. To give an example, let's say we set the cap at 5% YoY. Then if the market cap instead grows 10% in a given year, the company is forced to issue an additional ~5% of shares (of the total number of outstanding shares), which all directly go to the government. The government will then sell these evenly distributed over the next year, on the market.
Feels like this has far less loopholes than any kind of profit or revenue tax.
> “Common carrier” type of deal to allow any player to compete in an energy market, trying to stop behemoth entities from monopolistic?
See above, another subset of the category.
> Non-profit
Ah, like OpenAI? Or the one U2 has in The Netherlands?
>Capitalism with minimal regulation?
This option isn't even worth discussing.
> Government run?
This too can get lobbied away over time, as we've seen, but it takes the longest to do so, and is therefore the correct answer to the question.
Non-profit? Government run? Capitalism with minimal regulation? Capitalism with strict regulation? Profit caps? “Common carrier” type of deal to allow any player to compete in an energy market, trying to stop behemoth entities from monopolistic?
Very curious to hear from the non-US audience.
Personally, I lean towards gov run services for universal needs, like healthcare, electricity, heating, etc. But I am guessing the outcomes of whatever energy policy/regulations is the average of how the rest of society is doing.