Gordon Campbell has much to say over here. Most of which is just pandering to the social system known as capitalism* but I’m going to focus on one line, specifically:
“Such action is the only remaining tool left in the toolbox to foster meaningful competition.”
No, it really isn’t the only tool left. There is, after all, State Monopoly which could actually bring about ‘meaningful competition’.
Part of the problem here is that there is no defined meaning of ‘meaningful competition’. Really, what do those words, in that configuration, actually mean?
See, I have an idea about competition and how it can be meaningful and it doesn’t involve having more owners bludging off of the rest of us. Its about having an actual competition of ideas that brings about a better solution. A state monopoly can actually do this by supporting many people with different ideas that are openly compared to each other while private enterprise can’t because they’re too busy ensuring that nobody knows what they’re doing and setting up a monopoly for it.
Another problem is that competition, as brought about through the ~2500 year old rules of ownership, is highly expensive. All the added bureaucracy and advertising cost a hell of a lot on top of which is the dead-weight loss of profit**. All of this added cost is something that we customers have to pay for resulting in the prices being driven up even more. This is noted, indirectly, by Gordon Campbell in the complaints of the competition about how difficult it is breaking into the market.
The last part of the problem is that people have been taught that the highly expensive and obvious failure that is the private system, is the only option. It wasn’t the private system that got us trains, telecommunications and a viable health service. That was done by the government. The private system only became interested in it once the government had spent all the time and money to get it all up and running making it so that they could bludge off of us more easily.
- Capitalism isn’t an economic system, if it was then once Global Warming was identified and the reason known then the capitalists and economists would have acted to stop it as the actions brought about by capitalism were proven to be unaffordable. Its a social system designed to keep a few people rich at everyone else’s expense. Many of today’s economists are the new church that perpetuates this modern version of the Divine Right of Kings.
- Yes, profit is a dead-weight loss. In fact, the whole point of competition in a market system is to get rid of that loss. It just costs far more than it could possibly save and the governments of the world work to prop up the profit anyway (costing even more).