Then those are services that should be provided by the government, just like schools, police, fire, and road maintenance. New York City seems to run just find with various state and city owned and/or subsidized public transportation services. That’s what taxes are for.
I just don’t get the logic of some people. Is they expectation that Greyhound or whoever should operate this line at a loss because a group of people find it convenient? Would the same hold true if it were a small operation of a few busses and not a national corporation?
I’m not even sure the government is required to operate a money-losing bus line out to BFE, just because some jerks choose to live out there. That’s part of the consequence of choosing to live that far from anything.
Well, yes, the corporation has to follow the law and pay taxes being that a “corporation” is inherently a legal construct.
Here’s an old NY Times article on the Freeman Doctrine by Milton Friedman.
The gist is this. When you say a corporation has an “obligation to serve community” what you are really saying is that the corporations management are required to act in a way that is not in the best interest of the companies owners (shareholders), customers, or employees. By forcing a company to, for example, operate an unprofitable bus route, you are taking money that doesn’t belong to you that couple have been better spent elsewhere. You override market forces with political ones.
Now I now a lot of the people on this board don’t care about “market forces” or being “fair” to shareholders. But the market is a pretty good indicator of what services people need and want and what they are willing to pay for them.
So the question I might ask is if a route covers a neighborhood that doesn’t have enough customers to justify its existence, to whose benefit does it exist? Is there a real need for it or is it just some politician’s ploy to gather more votes?
This is how you get Boeing going from a company run by engineers and valuing its reputation highly to a company run by bean counters whose reputation is in tatters.
The other day Bernie Sanders was roasting some drug company executives for their excessively high prices (a drug I use, eliquis sells for less than 1/10 price in Canada as in the US and the companies aren’t losing money here). After Mitt Romney criticized Sanders because the job of the drug company executives is to extract as much as they can from their customers. And if some die because they cannot afford the drug (it prevents blood clots), well that is just the cost of capitalism.
The entire history of the industrial revolution and the resultant creation of millions of for-profit enterprises is an endless horrifying and stomach turning listing of crimes against humanity, whether they strictly violated current law or not. Every bit of today’s law is a forced response to decades of finally unbearable violations of decency. Yet they continue, from child labor to food adulteration to overwork, all denounced at the beginning of the 20th century. And they continue because not doing so would cost a few more pennies. Serve communities? How can anyone expect that when they do not serve their own workers?
Capitalism is what it is. It’s created incredible progress and a world full of wonders. I wouldn’t want to do without its benefits. However, the notion that corporations need to squeeze every penny to increase the wealth of its stockholders (who increasingly include all those running the company) to the negation of all else is one that was shown to be untenable more than a century ago. That the behavior continues and continues to be excused is unfathomable.
When corporations make billions, spreading one of those billions to improve the workplace, grant higher wages, and make the community in which it is situated a better place would unquestionably redound into greater satisfaction for the corporation itself in the long term. We know this because examples of corporations not behaving like ravening feral pigs do exist. Heck, any alleviation of the inequities of the current system would have to be an improvement for 99.999% of the world and no number of gated communities and private islands can forever separate the have-have-haves from the have-nots. Fuck Friedman. He is indefensible.
Sure he is. Corporations don’t have infinite billions. Greyhound, for example, only brings in between $500 and $700 million in revenue per year. They may not need to “squeeze every penny” but they need to be profitable.
And I suspect that since Greyhound tends to be offered as a budget alternative to other forms of intercity transportation, their margins aren’t particularly high.
So the question becomes, if Greyhound is forced to maintain a terminal in Dallas that they determined was unprofitable, who should cover those costs? Other customers along more profitable routes who will need to pay more to cover the less desirable routes and stations? The employees who need to take a pay cut?
Freidman’s point is that these are business decisions that should be worked out between the shareholders, the employees, and the customers. Not mandated by some outside political entity in the name of “social justice”.
Even at that, when did something like availability of long-distance bus travel become something that the government at any level is obligated to provide to people?
That’s part of the problem these days- some people have devised a rather nebulous idea of what a baseline standard of living is, and then claim that if the commercial world can’t provide it at a profit, then the government is obligated to do so at cost.
That’s what I’m curious about- when did having bus travel availability become something that governments are obligated to provide access to? Who decided this? I don’t remember voting for it, or it ever being a point of contention. But now all of a sudden, it’s something the government is obligated to provide because it’s convenient?
That seems to be the common thread- the current methods that are provided by the government are inconvenient. Someone can’t be expected to ride public transit to a grocery store, they have to be able to walk to it. They can’t go to the library for internet access, the companies must be required to build out infrastructure in unprofitable areas. They can’t ride public transit somewhere else to catch the bus to another city, the government must prop up an unprofitable bus station so it’s convenient.
I mean I’m a Dallas taxpayer, and I’d honestly rather any spare cash we have go toward our police department or for raising city worker salaries to make them more competitive, than to prop up an unprofitable bus station. I don’t see the obligation of the city or the state in doing that.
The federal Department of Transportation “currently subsidizes commuter and certificated air carriers to serve approximately 60 communities in Alaska and 115 communities in the lower 48 contiguous states that otherwise would not receive any scheduled air service.”
Is that any different than subsidizing a coach bus route, station or company?
Did Greyhound determine that their Dallas terminal was unprofitable?
Or did they determine that they were sitting on a real-estate gold mine and decide to sell out to pick up some cash?
My answer to your question would be different depending upon which reason - the real reason, not the stated reason - for Greyhound’s sale was the case.
ETA: We can throw in a few ancilliary reasons as well, such as “did the CEO approve this sale to hit a profit target that unlocks a huge bonus for him?” or suchlike.
I have never at any time said or implied that I wanted some outside entity to mandate operations in the name of social justice.
If you’re going to mention buses, though, I will remind you that the government was needed to properly integrate buses (as well as trains) engaged in interstate travel.
The reality of interplay between government and business - which I am touching on for the first time - is far more nuanced than your simplistic examples.
The government mandates thousands of details about thousands of business; that’s the “regulations” that companies constantly scream about. The list is too long and too familiar to write out, but you and I both know that mandates are made on hiring and firing, on product and employee safety, on pollution, on what can’t or must be said in commercials, on financing, buying, merging companies, on the issuing of stock itself.
The government also gives businesses goodies worth trillions of dollars every year. Not just outright subsidies, which once put into the budget are untouchable, but the sea of assurance businesses swim in. Courts have since the late 19th century been favorable to businesses, first against labor and later against all types of government regulations. A special irony emerges there. Most people think with good reason that the regulatory agencies are “owned” by the businesses they supposedly regulate. (Take the FAA and Boeing for a recent example.) Congress is also heavy-handed on the side of business. The DoD is heavily engaged in “political engineering;” spreading their suppliers out so that every congressional district has at least one, so that closing any would result in an unacceptable local loss of jobs. Or businesses simply control representatives. Joe Manchin and coal. Bob Dole was known as the Senator from Archer Daniels Midland.
How about a deal? Remove some of those trillions of dollars that the federal government (hey, I haven’t even counted in all the help from state, county, and local governments) gives to businesses and I’ll remove from the table any social justice mandates.
I’d argue it’s a huge waste of money; nobody in Victoria or Macon needs subsidized air travel, being an hour by car from San Antonio/Houston/Corpus, or Atlanta. Or that all those cities in western Nebraska need it- that’s a godforsaken desolate area out there- just because someone chooses to live near Alliance, NE doesn’t mean that everyone else should be on the hook to subsidize air travel (or anything else) for them.
And in the case of the Dallas station, it’s not the only one in the area by a long stretch. It’s just the most convenient for some people. And even that’s arguable.
There are problems with capitalism in highly complex societies. I’m guessing that Marco Polo or anyone else engaged in trade had to make their own trade routes and provide their own “infrastructure” and security because there were no outside sources. So the cost was visible to the capitalists.
In a highly complex, specialized society, it may indeed be possible to make even more profit by paying less or nothing towards infrastructure, support services. Even though you “should” be paying X amount, maybe you can hector or fool people into paying just x/3. Someone else pays for you, or maybe the service atrophies but you’re dead by the time the bill comes due. So there are plenty of ways where no one wants to pay and everyone grumbles about a support service that is still necessary. Perhaps even to collapse.
So these food deserts etc. weren’t possible in less complex societies, where you couldn’t have servants and support staff without actually feeding them and providing some sort of housing. But today, people would like to see as little as possible of these people, pretend they don’t have needs so profits can go up. And maybe the capitalists will die before the bill comes due.
This article from NBC Dallas/Fort Worth says the terminal is closing because the lease on the building expired but that the company is working with the city to find a new location, perhaps the old Union Station railroad terminal building. The article includes this email statement from Greyhound public relations.
When Greyhound was acquired by Flix SE in 2021, the prior owners of Greyhound, FirstGroup, retained ownership of many of the terminal locations, including the Dallas terminal. The property is now owned by Twenty Lake Holdings.
As our lease to use the terminal expires in October, we are in the early phases of working with the City of Dallas to identify Greyhound’s future terminal location. We will share more details as soon as we have them. We have no plans to end our service in Dallas, and our goal is to identify a new terminal location as soon as possible to continue offering affordable, accessible travel to and from the metroplex to all our customers.
The article notes that in some areas, intercity buses pick up passengers at the curb. I believe that’s how some of the low-cost bus companies, like Fung Wah, operate. (Though that sort of thing can be a nuisance, what with people standing around waiting for the bus, the noise and pollution from the idling buses and the obstruction to traffic.)
You have to get a commitment from the community (especially leaders) and their involvement no matter how nominal. Without it your throwing money into a sinkhole, whether government or business. This is how they save endangered species. The local community has to see the value/direct benefit of cooperation first. They have to ‘own’ or buy in to whatever the thing they are getting. Then essentially the community makes it successful. Viola! You just saved the endangered Hickatee turtle.
Note that this article was published a week before this thread condemning Greyhound was started. The OPs question still could have been asked, but it would have been nice to know the facts.
I’ve read that people in San Francisco objected to Google buses doing that exact curbside pickup, for the same reasons.