Comment by luckylion
5 days ago
Germany's public transport is really not privatized though. The Deutsche Bahn AG is structured as company, but is entirely owned by the federal government. There's very, very little public transportation (e.g. private buses between major cities) that is not owned and operated by the government.
What privatization are you talking about?
DB is only in its current state (company organization, leadership failures, organizational failures, underfunding for decades, etc) because of previous governments' failed attempts at privatization decades ago. Full actual privatization would not likely have yielded any better results - especially regarding the actual infrastructure itself. (There's enough examples worldwide)
It's also been used for cushy post-politics jobs and lots of other incompetent meddling - such as requiring and extracting profits, etc.
You're right that it's not privatized, but the root causes of current misery still are the privatization attempts and a significant neoliberal/conservative political force that caused decay and blocked progress/improvements.
You are contradicting yourself.
On the on hand you claim that a government-run railway company is better off than a privately run (Japan tends to disagree here).
On the other hand you admit that the problems of Deutsche Bahn stem from the fact that politicians have had too much influence on it.
Guess how you can keep politicians out of companies? By keeping them private.
I will never understand why so many people think that companies are magically doing better because the government is running them. That’s just a myth.
Both the government and private entities can be good or bad at running companies. However, the huge advantage with private companies is that customers have options thanks to competition.
Anyone who still has memories of telephone companies run by the government knows what I’m talking about.
As for Deutsche Bahn, the government has full control over it meaning the company is run by the government. Whether it’s officially a German Aktiengesellschaft or not, doesn’t matter at all.
Your argument is often brought up by proponents of a government-run railway so that they don’t have to admit that Deutsche Bahn isn’t doing well despite being run by the government.
Japan isn't really disagreeing. Japan had decades of tight control and infrastructure investment led by the government. Only pretty narrow rail operations are done privately. And in a system where those companies know pretty well that if they try things that go to far, they will have political issues.
And japan is also an exception, as most other system that do work well are not like Japan at all.
> I will never understand why so many people think that companies are magically doing better because the government is running them. That’s just a myth.
That's not really the claim. The reason government running them can work well is because you can run it like an integrated system for the public good. You can actually do system wide planning and implementation and transformation. You can do targeted investment across the whole live-cycle of the system and all its components. You can drive standardization.
Sure if a single company owned everything, they could do that to. But to have a single monopoly normal private company running so much of a countries infrastructure would be patently insane. And literally nobody has or will ever run things that way.
Britain trying to privatize Network Rail is about as close to as you are going to get. And that lasted for a few years at most.
> However, the huge advantage with private companies is that customers have options thanks to competition.
In a perfect world maybe, but when we are talking about rail systems, you do not magically get many rail lines between places just because you say 'private'.
It takes 100s of years of infrastructure and investment to build up a rail network.
And to unlock the true potential of that infrastructure having competing companies run trains on it, is just one marginal potentially beneficial thing you can do. And of the things you can do, its far, far, far away from what actually impacts the consumer the most.
This is completely clear to all experts that study this topic. Complete integrated time-tabling, planning and standardization is far more important then marginal competition on few main lines.
> As for Deutsche Bahn, the government has full control over it meaning the company is run by the government. Whether it’s officially a German Aktiengesellschaft or not, doesn’t matter at all.
You are narrowly talking about legal technicalities. But you are ignoring the larger cultural and historical aspect.
The fact is, the way the German government created the DB was to be private and to make money. That lead the DB culturally to act much differently then traditional national railway companies, like SBB.
And like an actual company they started to invest widely in all sorts of stuff while not focusing on their core business.
So legally it might not matter, but historically it for sure this. It actually makes a difference if your railway company is primary a national instrument to bring affordable public transportation to the people, or if its designed to be a profit making company.
> Your argument is often brought up by proponents of a government-run railway so that they don’t have to admit that Deutsche Bahn isn’t doing well despite being run by the government.
Everybody knows that government ownerships isn't a magic pill. And most people admit that DB isn't doing well and that its government owned. What people dislike is how DB is organized and set up and how politics and DB interacts.
For all its existence it has been 100% state-owned and state-controlled, yet because it's a failure, it's still somehow "not state, but actually privatized", even though not "full actual privatization" (but only imagined privatization).
I understand the desire to have a scapegoat for failure, and to externalize it in some abstract capitalists/neoliberals/conservatives, but abandoning reality to create your own world has no predictive power and is not a long-term strategy.
Please read again and don't put your own ideological spin on my words, please. I fully blame governments and politicians for all failures. I did not write that it's "actually" or otherwise privatized, in fact I wrote "you're right that it's not privatized".
The root cause is still privatization attempts and politicians that don't like well run public infrastructure and sabotage it through underfunding and bad requirements/structure. These are the same people that always claim that infrastructure will work perfectly well when just sold off to the private sector for maximum profit extraction. The working long term strategy is to get these out of position of power - however as is common, people like to vote against their own interests for ideological and emotional reasons.
No need to abandon reality, austerity and idiotic state underfunding of basic infrastructure (not just rail) have been the norm in Germany for decades. This isn't some crackpot conspiracy, but well accepted reality.
We don't usually think of the board of directors as controlling a company, nor the shareholders. They appoint a CEO, and then are hands-off unless the CEO really fucks up. This principle still remains true when the shareholders are a state.
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