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Allison Wojciechowski's avatar

Super interesting! Great read

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Y. Andropov's avatar

The Left wants the Post Office to run an airline.

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Joe Wrote's avatar

You're trying to be defamatory, but it falls flat considering the post office is an incredibly effective organization. It delivers just under 50% of the world's postage at a small cost to tax payers.

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Joe Wrote's avatar

It didn't "lose" anything - that's the cost of running a public service. That's like saying public schools "lost" us money because we had to pay for them to operate.

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Y. Andropov's avatar

How much is your predicted Government Airlines expected to lose? More or less than Amtrak?

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Joe Wrote's avatar

You changed the subject and you're still in the fallacy that public goods "lose" money.

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Tina Stolberg's avatar

Excellent proposal. After reading your paper, which I will reread, it brought to mind California's challenge with the power company PG&E and talk of bringing it under state ownership. Another option was mentioned in the discussion, that of a cooperative which I found interesting.

https://calmatters.org/politics/2020/02/what-happens-if-california-takes-over-pge/

I'm not up on this subject but the state already owns the roads, highways and bridges, right? I would think a good way to gauge the success of airline takeover is to look at how we are doing with that industry from a historical perspective to date. Does that offer any insights?

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Joe Wrote's avatar

There's a lot to be learned about cooperatively owned utilities. (IIRC, 10% of Americans get their water from publicly owned utilities). But I hesitate to look to anything in the US as a definitive answer of whether or not public ownership could work.

Our country is so opposed to private ownership, that even when it does occur (such as AMTRAK), they're underfunded and constantly attacked by capital. In my view, it's much more effective to look to models of public ownerships in nations that have this problem to a lesser degree.

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Tina Stolberg's avatar

Great point!

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Jared Holst's avatar

Incredible, thorough work. Appreciate you sharing the history of what makes airlines such so damn much.

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Joe Wrote's avatar

Thanks Jared! The history is one of those things that, if more people knew about, I suspect there would be strong public appetite for changing the industry.

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