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I dont want to drink water from govt owned companies because at that point it truly is authoritarian simply because the govt has way too much power over your life

I’m pretty sure private for-profit water is absolutely worse than government run water. Everyone can at least nominally vote to change the government. A private org is beholden to no one except shareholders (if they have any), and maybe laws (if they exist, are relevant, and are enforced).

We already had a gilded age where we learned how low for-profit entities will go. We had saw dust in bread, chalk in milk, and worse.

For profit food production is giving us price gouging and a water crisis. Would government do better? Well, given the current administration maybe not.

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untakenusername@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
i edited my comment before your reply to note that I simply used water as an example because it came first to my mind and there are better ones

As I wrote in my edited comment (that was changed before you replied) there are better examples of my point that I don’t want too much govt control, for example I wouldn’t want all the farms in my country controlled by the govt

A private org is beholden to no one except shareholders

And their consumers. An orange juice company tries to make their product sold, and at the end of the day they rely on you to buy it. If enough people don’t, they will increase the quality of their juice or decrease the price to increase sales.

We already had a gilded age where we learned how low for-profit entities will go. We had saw dust in bread, chalk in milk, and worse.

You should realize that companies need to compete with each other, and because of that they cant visibly increase the price of a good too much or lower its quality because they will lose sales. Anywhere where this doesn’t happen laws can be written to force them

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- jjjalljs@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  You should realize that companies need to compete with each other, and because of that they cant visibly increase the price of a good too much or lower its quality because they will lose sales. Anywhere where this doesn’t happen laws can be written to force them
  
  Meanwhile, we have “shrinkflation” and consolidation into fewer and fewer companies.
  
  For vital services, what are you going to do? Not get health care? Not buy fruit anymore?
  
  The natural end state of private ownership is monopoly/cartel. We’ve done all of this before and it sucked. Being “beholden to customers” doesn’t matter much if they’re a captive market, or there’s really only one seller with no vote
  
  Maybe if we actually enforced laws about competition it would be better, but good luck getting people to learn from history.
  
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