I'm coming far from the right here; I could accept the public ownership of the distribution system, but I don't see the need for state-owned generation. What you'd have is private power plants selling electricity to the grid, which sells to consumers. In effect, it'd be a government monopsony. But I worry about the risk of the government abusing its price-setting power to subsidise electricity costs at the expense of power producers, which would eventually drive them out and leave us under capacity. Perhaps the solution would be to have the grid jointly owned by the government (or a consumer's authority) and the producers. But I wonder about the actual
need for this (not that I think it really matters in terms of this party). I mean, it's not like our electricity costs are overly high compared to other countries, indeed, they're pretty low:
In terms of fossil fuels the solution is quite straightforward, but you're going to shut up a lot of the people who are calling for sustainable energy in the first place, build more large dams and nuclear power plants. That's the clean technology we have right now and it's not happening. I mean, there's a new report released just last month that says we could
add 65 GW of hydropower on untapped rivers, not including protected areas. A few years ago, it was found that we could add
70 GW of hydropower capacity just by modernising generation facilities and adding new hydroelectric facilities at existing dams. For perspective, we are currently producing 98 GW of hydropower. We don't need to nationalise everything in order to do this. But you're going to get environmentalist complaining about dams.
As for transport I really prefer the same model, a fee for use. Which is what happens at airports, and in railways in Europe. Competition is what drives prices down and quality up. How does this incentive exist in a monopoly,
especially one controlled by labor unions. They have a vested interest in extracting as high a cost as possible and providing as little service as is feasible. While I'm pro-train to the point that I'd be willing to drive buses out of existence, I think AMTRAK needs to focus on providing services where it can be truly competitive and revenue generating.
Long distance trains are used by three sorts of people, only two of which are travelling along the entire route: those with a fear of flying, tourists, and people travelling between intermediate points. The existing service ends up not serving anyone well, and I think the market could present a better alternative. The first group is too small to really merit consideration. The second group could and would be willing to pay for a higher-quality tourist train along these groups. The third group would be well-served by regional rail services; these aren't often possible so they could be operated by the regions. But, again nationalisation offers no answers.
A quality high speed regional service would allow airlines to eliminate revenue-losing regional routes and focus on profitable inter-city services. We can increase competition by raising the foreign ownership barriers for airlines and expanding our open skies agreements.
I know I am talking to a brick wall in this regard, but you only need look at Europe to see what the effects of high levels of competition have done to airfares. Protection in American skies has given us, to a large extent, the overly-priced, poor quality airlines that we are burdened with. And how are they to compete, one might ask, if it seems they all seem to being going bankrupt every few years? I don't think you're going to like the answer:
We see that labor costs are higher in the US than they are in Europe, and that legacy carriers with long contracts have higher costs than newer carriers, furthermore, legacy carriers have trailed the low-cost ones in productivity increases. The answer to lower costs would be to give the airlines greater flexibility in regards to labor, but we are going in the opposite direction.
Furthermore our airlines are dealing with aging fleets with poor fuel efficiency with limited capital with which they could modernise them. If were to give them the flexibility to lower costs and the ability to seek increased foreign ownership, that might give them access to cash with which to do so- therefore lowering costs further.
