It seems to work for the courier business.
You haven’t a clue how wasteful it is. You’re basing this claim on “I see a lot of garbage trucks,” which is about as useful an analysis as just making things up.
Without looking at the numbers, knowing the costs, pickup times, resource usage, revenues, salaries, and a million other things, you haven’t any idea how efficient or inefficient local garbage pickup is.
You don’t say.
But the fact remains the government does seek to make a profit - or a margin, if you prefer - on a lot of governmental services. And, to an extent, why not? Here in Canada the passport function, for instance, makes more in revenue than it costs to run (or it used to, anyway.)
The point is that you simply aren’t seeing the entire picture. Consider: Let’s say you have one truck that serves your entire neighborhood, then it’s full and it drives all the way back to the landfil.
Now you have five trucks coming into your neighborhood, each one leaving 1/5 full. But those trucks can each serve FIVE neighborhoods before heading back to the landfill. Now suddenly it doesn’t see as inefficient.
But also, maybe having five companies means that the trucks can be sized differently. Instead of one huge truck driving through the neighborhood, trucks can be sized more efficiently based on how many contracts a company has in an area.
You also aren’t seeing the whole picture. Maybe the city landfill operation is very inefficient, and the trucks have to line up there for long periods of time before disposing of their goods, and the private companies have worked out more efficient offloading techniques, and this compensates for the slightly longer travel distances of the trucks.
You honestly can’t know which method is more efficient without analyzing their entire operation.
Really? My neighborhood has a postal truck, UPS trucks, Fed Ex trucks, Purolator trucks, and a few other delivery services. In addition, we have vans driving through delivering goods to people from Sears, Home Depot, and other stores.
Is this your idea of horrible inefficiency?
That’s pretty much what we have. And as a whole, our package and mail distribution infrastructure is much more efficient today than it was before all that fragmentation occurred.
You haven’t made this case at all. Here’s a better way to make your case - go find the cities that have privatized garbage collection, and the ones that do it themselves, and see if the ones with private garbage collection cost the taxpayers more. A quick google on my part suggests that many cities have switched to privatized garbage collection, and that most of them are seeing savings from doing so. How could that be if public garbage collection is five times more efficient?
The OP is referring to what is called a “natural monopoly”. Certain networked services like the cable or local power and gas will tend towards monopoly due to the expense of running multiple sets of power, cable or gas lines to the same neighborhood.
[quote=puddleglum ]
This is not just associated with garbage pickup. Why should we have Coke and Pepsi, there is a tremendous amount of redundancy there. Also Burger King and McDonalds and Wendy’s all have redundant efforts.
This is the traditional arguement for socialism.
[quote]
No, the traditional argument for socialism is the tendency for wealth to concentrate with a small percentage of the population.
The argument AGAINST socialism is that a central government cannot decide how much soda to produce (releative to all the other products that need to be produced) as well as the free market.
Socialists continue to cling to a fantasy that the government has the ability and motivation to fix all problems.
And then there are others who cling to the fear the government will succumb to the socialists when government does anything outside explicitly defined parameters, parameters that only appear explicitly defined by the same fear mongers.
Sam, the problem here is that the OP has identified an inefficiency (and it is an inefficiency-- If nothing else, those trucks are driving more miles) associated with the free market that a government-run program wouldn’t have. All you’re doing is saying that the government might have other inefficiencies, but all of the inefficiencies you’re pointing out are things that could also apply to the private companies.
One piece of information missing from the OP is whether or not someone is required to purchase garbage pickup from one of these five companies.
You don’t even KNOW if those trucks are driving more miles. All we have is anecdotal evidence that trucks from different companies pass each other in residential areas. It may well be that the overall routing is more efficient this way for that particular city. Like I said, if five trucks go into an area instead of one, they can service five different areas before returning to the landfill.
Or look at it this way - let’s say a neighborhood has five truckloads worth of garbage in it. Either way, five trucks are coming into that neighborhood to remove the garbage. But if they’re all identical city trucks, the OP might not notice that. If they’re all different, it catches his attention and he translates it as, “Four more trucks than there needs to be.”
I can give you a concrete example: You don’t see city garbage trucks in my neighborhood more than once - because the city staggers pickup. On my block, the garbage was picked up today. On the next block, it might be tomorrow. So I’m never going to see five trucks parade by in a single day, but if a truck comes into the general neighborhood every day, that’s still five truckloads worth per week. Now if the city privatizes it and gives a block to each company, and they all pick up on the same day, then I’ll see five trucks driving in, four of which skip me and continue on down the road. That sure looks inefficient, but in fact the exact same miles are being driven.
There’s just not enough information in the OP to even hazard a ballpark guess as to whether the private companies are more or less efficient.
There isn’t any more information available. There are only 12 houses on my street, each using one of the 5 companies. I use one, the guy across uses WM the guy next door uses Allied. Each of those trucks are running the best possible route they can, but it still means 5 different trucks go down my street, stopping at different houses.
Imagine if me and my neighbour each ordered pizza at the same time. Would you consider it efficient for the driver to make two trips? Would it make sense to send two cars?
I’m guessing those trucks don’t drive all the way from the landfill just to pick up the trash from one or two houses. So there’s other parts of the route we can’t see, and we don’t know the ‘big picture’.
I’m not sure why this is hard to understand. I wish I could draw a diagram to illustrate.
Your pizza analogy is ridiculous. I noticed that you ignored the fact that package delivery became more reliable and more efficient when the post office gave up its monopoly and allowed multiple vendors to deliver packages. That’s a much closer situation, since you have large trucks delivering goods throughout a city. A Fed Ex truck can pull into my neighborhood at the same time as a UPS truck and a Purolator truck. Is this evidence to you that we’d be better off scrapping all this redundancy and having one government delivery service so that routes could be consolidated?
And in the absence of fear mongers you get the country of Greece and the states of California and Illinois. The parameters are simple, deficit spending causes debt and continuous deficit spending causes default.
As to the op, multiple trash collectors are no more inefficient than multiple retail outlets for the products we buy. If 5 are too many trash collectors the market will eliminate the weak. The most likely result is that a weak company will be absorbed by a stronger one. Company names will and overlapping assets will be sold off.
When I think of government inefficiencies I think of pork. My city was awarded “stimulus money” to buy hybrid buses. We already have electric buses. I’m sure the new buses are lovely but who bought them? If every city gets a huge pile of money then which city is left to pay for it?. If it’s debt that means we’re paying a premium for the assets.
My state was awarded $400 million for high speed rail. Studies show the State will lose $17 million a year if it is built. We’re trying to turn the money away to avoid unnecessary state debt. So the Federal government has committed to additional debt in order to saddle us with additional debt. If it’s turned away it will probably be awarded to another project. Who is going to pay for this?
Personally, I feel should all go out and buy 100 “forever” stamps to put on thank you cards to be mailed out randomly to people not yet born. Or maybe they should be for apology cards. Hey, maybe we can put the “sorry we saddled you with our debt” on those highway signs currently being put up with stimulus money denoting the fact that we’re spending stimulus money.
Okay, I have to apologize, there are actually 6 waste removal companies, not 5. But one of them isn’t represented on my block.
Other than that, there is no trick. It’s a normal block, in a normal subdivision, in an otherwise normal small city. Every Tuesday morning the people on my street roll out their garbage containers to the end of their driveway. The only difference from any other place I’ve been is that the garbage cans are labeled with the individual garbage company.
Maybe I’m still not clear on this. Two people on my block use the same company as me, so my company has a truck that gets our three houses, skipping over the other houses. They will have a different truck, from a different company, drive past my house to get my neighbour’s trash. It’s that simple. It is as stupid as a pizza delivery chain sending two cars to deliver two pizzas to my house.
If you want a comparison, imagine 5 separate sets of power lines running down your street representing 5 different power companies, all supplying the same power. Or 5 water pipes all sending the same water.
Or better yet, five sets of sewage lines that all take sewage to the same place!
You’re right, this is Great Debates, so here is some more relevant information:
There are currently 6 companies **licensed **by the city for trash removal. I am not required to contract with them, if I want I can haul my own garbage to one of four local transfer stations.
I am forbidden from burning garbage, and am liable for the garbage that I throw away–a good thing to know.
I looked through three of the companies websites, and they all take my trash to the same landfill about 30mile away (owned by one of the 6 companies). Although I maintain the legal right to determine the final destination for my trash. Also a good thing to know.
So I wasn’t kidding when I said there are 5 trucks that come to my street, to take trash, to the same place. This isn’t a case of overlap on a supply chain. I’m not looking at trucks doing along my street to other places. Different trucks pick up the garbage from different houses.
If I wanted, I could contract with all 6 of them. I could have six different bins (I currently have two but that’s a different issue). Every Tuesday six trucks could come to my house and take my trash to the same place.
I know Fedex/UPS was mentioned as improving shipping, and that’s true, when stuff is coming from different places. But what we’re talking about here would be if each person on my street picked between USPS/Fedex/UPS to bring their mail from the local transfer station. There would literally be three different mail trucks going down my street every morning. There is nothing efficient in that exercise. But I do appreciate all your efforts.
Okay, you agree that’s stupid. You know what would be worse? If there were 6 separate high speed rail lines, all going between the same two places, under capacity, using identical trains, with an identical schedule.
Would you agree that would be 6 times worse than what you were describing? Well, that’s what the market has created here.
Power and sewer are utilities. They require a great deal of infrastructure and require singular connectivity to physically work. That doesn’t stop the market from operating as a series of collectives. In my city I have a choice of companies for natural gas. It comes from the same supplier but the sale of it is done by a multitude of companies who buy the product wholesale.
Garbage is a service just as a retail store is. Most cities have multiple retail outlets for a variety of product types whether it’s groceries or electronics. Market forces determine the number of services that are optimal for the area.
A rail line represents dedicated land and significant infrastructure. Garbage trucks are mobile retail outlets that deliver directly to your home using existing infrastructure.
I have to agree that 6 different companies sounds like a lot of retail chasing too few dollars. Time will tell what it really should be.
Government waste is not necessarily any worse than private enterprise waste. Here’s the way I see it, centrally planned economies work pretty well (see Japan inc. 1970-1990, or China 1980-present) until the technocrats screw up (see Japan inc. 1990-2005). The free market doesn’t work as well or as efficiently because all those companies going bankrupt (creative destruction and all that) but there is no single mistake that is going to cripple the economy (at least until recently, and even then it wasn’t a single mistake it was the combined mistakes of a lot of people). But when we talk about direct government participation in the economy, there are simply some things that make sense and some things that do not.
In cities like NYC, there is private and public trash collection. The public trash collectors work for the department of sanitation and pick up residential trash. The private trash collectors work for the mafia and they pick up the commercial trash. Both are fairly well organized and you have no choice but to pay for their services. Even the criminals recognize the efficiencies associated (at least in urban environments) with not having 5 different companies drive down the same street.
In my little subdivision, every homeowner contracts for their own trash pickup and every last one of them uses the exact same trash company (there are three in the area), not because there is a conspiracy or even because one is generally speaking better or cheaper than all the others but because one of them was able to grab enough of the homes that it was able to offer lower rates to all the homes in the subdivision. One subdivision over another company has about 90% of all the contracts. Having 5 trash companies drive into the same cul de sac is silly and it can’t last that long before your trash company realizes that the incremental cost of collecting your neighbors trash is a lot less than what your neighbor is currently paying.
You can in fact have multiple energy producers selling to end users and then paying a wheeling charge to have the energy distributed to their customers. Its kind of how long distance telephone service operates in America (and how Cable SHOULD operate)
If there were two companies and two houses in a cul de sac, the incremental cost of one of the companies picking up the neighbors trash as well is a lot lower than the cost of that second truck driving up to that neighbor’s to pick up trash. You could almost cut the trash collection costs in half in that case.
This is true. When that one trash company controls the entire subdivision, they can charge just a little less than what it would cost a trash company to start servicing the first home in the area and still never lose a customer. But you are likely to get there with a free market in trash disposal.
Did you miss these diagrams http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4181904/organized.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4181904/disorganized.png ?
Which isn’t really relevant to trash collection.
For the past 20 or 30 years people here in DC have made a career of figuring out how to inject free market principles into areas where government was doing a perfectly good job (did you know they privatized tax collection for a while, thats right they outsourced the collection of overdue taxes and gave the collection agencies 30% of what they collected, it was ridiculous but thats what you get when people are looking for answers that are consistent with a particular ideology rather than answers that make the most sense.
So you don’t think there is a line somewhere between trash disposal and consumer products where you might draw a line and say government might be able to handle these things well (perhaps better than the private sector) and the government is probably NOT going to handle these thing very well?
In some cases the economies of scale and the benefits of a cohesive development strategy is superior to the creative destruction of the private sector.
Yeah but not to the same block.
What about 5 different companies going into the same cul de sac?
As a monopoly the government can make huge profits if it really wants to. It doesn’t because people don’t want to pay $5 to ride the subway so they elect politicians that promise $3 subway fares. Stuff like driver’s licenses and car registration happens infrequently enough that noone runs on that sort of platform. The FCC in the US sells bandwidth at public auction, the money the auctions raise more than adequately fund the FCC THe mining and minerals commission at the department of the interior collects more in oil lease payments than it costs to run the organization too. I don’t consider the ability of a government entity to turn a profit a particular strength.
Yeah, I still don’t understand why we don’t regulate Cable a bit more than we do.
Yeah the private sectors doesn’t have that ability and motive either. Most socialists I know allow for the fact that government AND the private sector are necessary parts of the equation, the free marketeers I know do not hold similarly balanced views.
You mean like these?
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4181904/disorganized.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4181904/organized.png
Sure these are meant to depict mail routes and stuff but you get the idea.
The USPS never had a monopoly on packages, DHL has been around as long as any of us have been alive. The USPS has a monopoly on first class mail ad that doesn’t look like it will go away.
DHL and the package industry is a classic example of market forces at work. They bought out Airborne Express and was in turn bought out by Deutsche Post and was then subsequently eliminated from the US domestic market by Federal Express and UPS (which bought out Emery/Consolidated which had bought out Purolator). Add in the demise of Kittyhawk and you have a great deal of market transition in a very small time frame.
Japan did not have a centrally planned economy from 1970-1990. It had a mixed economy, and as I understand it a fairly liberal one compared to the rest of the world. The government certainly interfered with the free market, but that’s true for any mixed economy.
You’re right that they screwed up in their handling of the 1990s financial crisis though. Stimulus packages. Bailouts. Growing budget deficits. What were they thinking? :smack:
As for China, China’s great economic growth happened only after they abandoned central planning in favor of economic liberalization. They’re still a mixed economy of course, and not a very free one at that, but economic freedom is steadily increasing along with GDP.
