*** The Official CUCKposting thread ***

[Poopadoop]

The thing with the trains is there's only one track going from A to B usually, so you can't really have companies competing over customers in a free markety kind of way. Are they going to build another track next to it and say 'come on our track, it's cheaper?' And how can they do that if they just spend £40m or whatever to build the second track? Or, are they supposed to have two companies using one track and constantly getting in each other's way?

Same thing with highways. The gov't builds it, owns it, and it's paid for with taxes. So if you did the same with trains that would keep one company from having a monopoly and bilking the shit out of everyone the way they do now.

[BananaStand]

Same thing with highways. The gov't builds it, owns it, and it's paid for with taxes. So if you did the same with trains that would keep one company from having a monopoly and bilking the shit out of everyone the way they do now.

This is reflexive liberalism. Just because there is a monopoly, doesn't mean you're getting bilked.

I actually don't know the pricing structure of the train, but in general, public stuff run by private companies is subject to heavy government regulation, mostly to prevent the public from being bilked.

For example, I know of an electric company. They don't just charge whatever people are willing to pay for electricity. that's a fucking dangerous game. Instead, they have to show the government how much capital they have invested in the enterprise of delivering electricity. Then they say, a fair return on that capital investment, given our level of risk, etc etc etc., is X%.

Then the government has to approve that %. Sometimes they change it. At the company I'm thinking of, they went a little extravagant with the capital investments and the government said "whoa, people don't need that shit, you're not earning a return on that frivolous spending"

Anyway once the % is set, they multiply it by qualifying capital investments, and that is their return for the year. Then they add their annual operating expenses, and that's the revenue. Then they divide that revenue by the number of Kilowatt hours they expect to sell, and boom, there's your price for electricity.

[Poopadoop]

This is reflexive liberalism.

Stopped reading here.

[OngBonga]

St...

Stopped reading here.

[Poopadoop]

.

Didn't even read.

Checkmate, bitch.

[OngBonga]

Didn't even read.

Checkmate, bitch.

Fuck, you said checkmate before I did.

[BananaStand]

Stopped reading here.

of course....you snowflakes always shit your pants whenever someone challenges your false libtard dogma.

[Poopadoop]

of course....you snowflakes always shit your pants whenever someone challenges your false libtard dogma.

Or maybe it's that you're just so boring and predictable.

[spoonitnow]

of course....you snowflakes always shit your pants whenever someone challenges your false libtard dogma.

True and false are concepts that elude those infected.

[wufwugy]

The thing with the trains is there's only one track going from A to B usually, so you can't really have companies competing over customers in a free markety kind of way. Are they going to build another track next to it and say 'come on our track, it's cheaper?' And how can they do that if they just spend £40m or whatever to build the second track? Or, are they supposed to have two companies using one track and constantly getting in each other's way?

The answer is I don't know yet in general the specifics for how these things get dealt with. The high fixed cost (and economies of scale) you describe are the theoretical reasons for how monopolies can develop in a free market. Markets continually evolve and over time they tend to allocate resources the way that works best for all those who engage in the market on average.

Same thing with highways. The gov't builds it, owns it, and it's paid for with taxes. So if you did the same with trains that would keep one company from having a monopoly and bilking the shit out of everyone the way they do now.

We don't even know that monopolies bilk people. We know that in theory they can. However, two things on this:

(1) I once asked a professor which companies are setting quantity where marginal cost meets marginal revenue instead of where marginal cost meets demand (that's the way monopolies can theoretically bilk consumers), and his response was "nobody knows".

(2) The best examples of natural monopolies I know of don't seem to behave like the negative way monopolies can in theory.



A side point that might explain why monopolies don't seem to behave like "monopolies" is because of play between markets. Each decision a person makes is associated with a cost and an opportunity cost, and each person has marginal preferences. So, when the cost of something in one market changes, other markets that act as either substitutes or complements experience a change in demand. So, the idea that there is "no choice" but to take the train to see Grandma isn't quite true. Sure, you, at this specific point in time, when adjusting for your costs and your preferences, if you will go to see Grandma you take the train, but the state of the market is not created by that type of "no choice". Instead it is created by all the people who make marginal decisions about whether or not to use the train to do something, to use something else to do that something, or to do something else entirely. If we combine with this the fact that public relations are VERY important to even the most monopolistic company, we can possibly explain why natural monopolies don't seem to behave like the theoretically negative ways monopolies can.