Now, there are some natural monopolies. Water supply is one. Education is another if everyone is to benefit from it.
How is education a monopoly?
and health care for everyone
Why does universal health care have to be a monopoly?
Now, there are some natural monopolies. Water supply is one. Education is another if everyone is to benefit from it.
How is education a monopoly?
and health care for everyone
Why does universal health care have to be a monopoly?
Shame he doesn’t have the monopoly on stupidity. That’s unfortunately a ruthlessly competitive & ever expanding market.
In the DDR education was a monopoly. Designed by Margit Hoenecker.
That is shirley the society he aspires to.
Is he choosing his own meaning for natural monopoly, like he did with real interest rates.
Naturally, I want education to be a monopoly, therefore it’s a natural monopoly.
Actually water isn’t a monopoly either. I could drill a borehole and have free water. Or indeed collect rainwater in a big tank or reservoir. And I have my own septic tank too, so I could be completely off grid. Indeed my farm used to have its own independent water supply once upon a time. It had a borehole with a wind pump which pumped water into big tanks in the roof of the farmhouse and barns, and everything worked on gravity feed. Then they built an airfield close by during the war and the borehole dried up overnight.
Not monopolies but utilities generally have vast economies of scale and very high regulation costs.
I assume the monopoly he refers to is the state?
I could drill a borehole and have free water.
Don’t think you can actually, Jim. You need an abstraction license. Not automatically granted. Also, if I recall correctly, the supply has to be tested to ensure it’s of sufficient quality. By the time you’ve paid for all that you’d be running near what it costs for a supply.
Another thing you can’t do is run a supply from a different property across the boundary
You only need an abstraction license for more than 4000 gallons a day.
Health care and education are definitely not monopolies
If you’re a Marxist, there are few things you can’t make into a monopoly.
In effect the piece is arguing the state should have total control over certain things and arms length control over everything else. He is a totalitarian, idiotically thinking the likes of him would be perpetually in charge. I’d expect him to be lined up against a wall about half an hour before I was under Hamas or a genuinely Hard Left government – it wouldn’t be much consolation.
None of the things he describes are natural
Monopolies – Indeed I’d argue the reason education and health are in such a dire state is precisely because they have been run in such fashion. He is a cretin.
It’s just sad, seeing him constantly displaying ignorance. He doesn’t know what ‘natural monopoly’ means and he doesn’t understand that changing technology can kill a natural monopoly (or bring it into existence) based on changing the costs of provision. What might have been a natural monopoly in our childhood (say, electricity) no longer is – solar and easy access to powerful FF generators.
Water provision is not a natural monopoly either – pipes, wells, bottles, and cisterns that are filled by a truck periodically are used where I live.
Is he getting confused between natural monopolies and public goods?
Not that education and healthcare are generally public goods anyway, but there’s a reasonable argument that they are at very basic levels (having a population that can read, preventing the spread of infectious diseases…)
Or does what he writes just no longer bear any relation to any reality other than “MOAR TAX, MOAR GOVERNMENT”?
He’s basing this on “if everyone is to benefit from it”.
The Collectivist argument is easy to make, as it so often is. Children at fee-paying schools get a serious leg-up, while those at the bottom in schools with insufficient funds stare at crumbling walls.
Take all the money spent on all children’s education, divide it equally amongst all children, and Hey Presto! We have fairness, equality of opportunity and who could possibly argue against that?
“Is he getting confused between natural monopolies and public goods?”
I struggle a bit with the definition of public goods. Am I right in thinking that bad news is a public good? It seems to me that you can’t stop people from sharing it and it doesn’t get used up by the sharing.
“Don’t think you can actually, Jim. You need an abstraction license. Not automatically granted. Also, if I recall correctly, the supply has to be tested to ensure it’s of sufficient quality. By the time you’ve paid for all that you’d be running near what it costs for a supply.”
An abstraction licence and testing are government regulation, which doesn’t determine if something is a natural monopoly or not. Yes the government can create a monopoly by force if it choses, we all know that. It has the guns after all. But a natural monopoly is one that in and of itself (and in the absence of State interference) would still be a monopoly.
“Another thing you can’t do is run a supply from a different property across the boundary”
Yes you can, it happens all the time – there are multiple properties that I supply with water, indeed their deeds say I must supply them. That water does come from the mains originally, and is piped and metered on to them across the boundary, but it could equally come from a borehole of mine. In some very rural parts of the country farms and houses are supplied by natural spring sources and they are usually in different ownership, and the owner of the source has the responsibility of supply to everyone else.
“who could possibly argue against that?” Anyone who has read the research papers that look on the effect of expenditure per head on educational attainment in schools. Try as they might nobody has seemed able to show that the moolah much matters.
The Wold Top Brewery in North Yorkshire has its own water supply. They say that it is one of the things that makes their beer special.
Harveys’ get their water out of the Ouse in Lewes.
It’s probably why I don’t like the stuff.
I only drink bottled water, send my kids to private (funded and run) school and the few times we need healthcare I tend to use private (sometimes funded out-of-pocket and sometimes through private insurance). I think that is sufficient as evidence
There are certain things that are pretty much “nature;”monopolies because of the costs involved. Water distribution, electricity distribution being two. But water itself can be a contestable supply as can electricity. One can make the distribution assets a (probably heavily regulated) monopoly and allow the contestable supply via those networks. And even those currently mostly monopolistic items are under some threat. Electricity and water can both be self sourced if the regulators allow, there is typically some loss of service (though not always, a lot of rural people have their own water supply that is more or less the equivalent of a town supply).
So as usual typical tosspottery from the Spud.