Yeah, utilities does seem like a strange bridge on which to make a stand for the efficiency of private industry.
Actually your whole spiel is apples to oranges, so what’s your point? I could go into how ridiculously inefficient and mismanaged to Postal Service is, but that would only serve to derail the topic even further.
The subject at hand was a point of contention in the WI bill regarding public utilities, the complaint about which was roundly refuted from a budgetary standpoint, which is what this discussion is ultimately all about, BTW.
Please proceed leaving my personal choices out of it, if you don’t mind. 
Did Wisconsin privatize its prisons?
There’s no point in trying to correct Nadir. He’s already expressed his total disdain for graphs, statistics, and history as so much hogwash over in the Conservative America thread. Like Starving Artist his personal perception trumps any sort of data you might provide. The only cite he can give you is what he feels and he isn’t going to acccept any of yours as worth reading.
So which answer below is most correct:
A) Public utilities are more efficient and less costly than privatized ones.
B) Union workers on average receive lower pay and less benefits than non-union workers.
C) Legislators have every right to refuse participation in the assembly and voting process.
D) None of the above.
If you want the package to get there 99% of the time, pick UPS. 95% of the time, pick USPS. UPS is more expensive but they are reliable. Also UPS isn’t 8 BILLION in the hole.
I’d rather have Blue Cross than Medicare.
I don’t have any experience with public water but my service with Adelphia cable was excellent other than the expense.
I don’t think corporations are intrinsically bad. Collusion between corporations and monopolies are bad.
E) You’re a fucking halfwit.
No you couldn’t.
That’s gonna need a cite. Also, do you know why USPS is in the hole? Two real reasons. Email, and universal delivery. If UPS had to offer daily delivery to every address (mostly, some rural areas have communal dumps) in the country they would both cost more and slow down.
Medicare has very high patient satisfaction, and is covered by the taxes you paid into it. Once you turn 65 I doubt you’ll prefer Blue Cross.
I have nothing to say about this one.
Corporations aren’t bad. But they extract profit from anything they do. Something run efficiently and not for profit is inherently going to be cheaper.
If you’re interested, you should look at the experiences of public cable utilities. Some communities can’t find cable companies that fit their standards of price and service and so start up their own cable providers. My brother lived in a community that did so and he was happy with his $45 a month service, which doesn’t sound cheap except when you look at the alternatives.
I have not words to express how much I fucking loathe this douchebarge. He was a terrible, incompetent County Executive, and now he’s even worse as a Governor. It makes me literally (literally-literally) sick to my stomach and ashamed of my state. The best thing for us (and the country, in terms of precedent) would be for him to be run over by a truck at lunch. Ten trucks. Ugh.
But then some poor schmuck has to scrape him off the grill and into the sewer.
I’d pay for the privilege.
Ms. Rachael Maddow, she of the swan’s neck, girlish giggle and steel-trap mind, speculated and offered evidence last night that Walker was being groomed for higher office, which is why he is doing all these “Reganesque” kinds of things. So its not even about Wisconsin, so much as it is about a nationwide political stunt to put their golden boy into the spotlight. She made a pretty good case, and I think she’s on to something, there.
In California the Public electric utilities have lower rates and are more reliable than the investor-owned utilities.
What? Enron lied to us?
And the CA budget deficit is how many $billion?
A little research on exactly how such a confluence of events might come to pass would shed some light and bring another common related term: Mismanagement.
http://www.getsmartaboutbanks.com/2010/11/bill-moyers-welcome-to-the-plutocracy/comment-page-1/ Moyers explains the aims and what the fight is about here. We have lost. I like that some people are fighting but it is too late.
The state does not own or run any utilities.
Tonight on Dirty Jobs…
Economic efficiency is rightly a primary objective in most endeavors and in the overall structure of an economy. It’s an excellent criterion for analyzing many public policy decisions.
But it’s not the only criterion, and in some public policy areas it’s rational to choose a policy that favors the greater social good at the cost of some economic efficiency.