A conversation with Scott tonight brought up some issues which I had never really considered, and as I started reading The New York Times, I found while reading a certain article that I had no choice but to continue thinking about these issues. In the portion of the conversation that I'm talking about, we discussed the different opinions on Welfare between liberals and conservatives as an example of the two groups' underlying mindsets. I attempted to describe my understanding of the way liberals view the phenomena that conservatives derogatorily refer to as "tax and spend". They see it as "Democratic Socialism", a democratically elected representative government using certain tactics of socialism to provide for the common good. The federal and state governments, in this opinion, should have control over certain industries, making them public services instead. Examples are the federal postal service, public schools, public transportation, public libraries, Medicaid and Medicare (practically the opposite of the insurance industry), and various forms of police (rather than hired security forces). Maybe even the military, as opposed to hired mercenary groups (which would certainly be a possibility; Republicans should look into this, given their affiliation with the NRA and their desire to privatize other government services, like Social Security). I mentioned to Scott that the federal government in the 19th century probably would (and should) have attempted to make the railroad publicly owned, but iron, coal and railroad tycoons were too powerful for this to happen. This would still work for the railroad today, and for air travel, rather than bailing out Amtrak and the failing airlines.

I got to thinking what other industries might be better as government-owned services, and what was preventing this from coming to be. The services I mentioned, now provided by the government, generally go unquestioned, except for schools (one of the goals of conservative Republicans, as seen in the attempts to provide school vouchers, is to privatize public schools). Some of my other examples have somewhat of a dual life: there are both public and industrially owned bus services (Greyhound); the federal postal service is not the only way to send mail and packages (FedEx and UPS). What reasons might there be for these services to be provided by the government and funded by taxes, while others are privately owned and "provided" for a fee? If the government can sell postal stamps to pay for shipping our letters, why don't they have a similar service that provides us with energy? Why should corporations sell us oil and electricity?

The conservative response is that these industries are controlled, and benefited, by market forces. Roughly, we are given options: different corporations compete, and certain companies become successful and bigger and are able to serve us better. Prices change with the market, and the market insures that they never become unreasonable. Conservatives believe that this is the best, and only, option. But these market forces caused, as an example, the California energy crisis, which would not have happened if the government provided our energy, or even set price limits or had stronger regulations. The conservatives argue that price limits and regulations (like environmental policy) interfere with market forces. (Incidentally, the energy industry made billions in the California energy crisis, and it has been discovered that they also had a hand in creating it by using market manipulation.) Now, I'm not an expert in the field; I don't even claim to have a great understanding of the issue, so I'm willing to admit that this is an uninformed opinion. But for what it's worth, I see no benefit to having energy be privately owned and sold. As far as I can see, market forces in this case are entirely to the companies' benefit, and do not help the public.

My understanding of it is that market forces allow for change and growth by giving the consumers options. The companies who provide us with X are driven to improve their version of X, or make X as inexpensive as possible. These are definite benefits. However, they apply to some things and not to others. To elaborate, I considered whether the government should own the food industry. The only example I could think of was school lunch, and I think that shows why this would not be beneficial. Food would become constricted, boring, lifeless. There would presumably be no diversity in restaurants, and few options in supermarkets (there would be only one brand of everything). However, these industries are only one aspect of "the food industry": that of refined products. The raw material is produced on farms. And I see no reason why the government shouldn't own farms (and as a side note, they could then fully regulate those factory-like conditions that make me consider becoming a vegan again). Farmers are not competing to provide better products; they don't have to. The product, in this case, is a natural resource. The industry of food production is mainly concerned with things like pest control (which requires government regulation to make it less environmentally harmful), foreign competition (they work with the government to help stanch this), making food production cheaper (and getting government subsidies), and advertising (those "got milk?" or "beef; it's what's for dinner" commercials are created by The National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, and America's Beef Producers, respectively. I couldn't find a website for either organization, but I found that the NFMPPB is a government organization, industry governed and USDA monitored, designed to create more demand for milk. Oh man am I ever going to have to do more research on this. The ABP, conversely, is the advertising wing of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. At any rate, these organizations' sole purpose is not to improve their product, but to make it look better. I cannot begin to describe how upsetting this is to me; this is detrimental, not beneficial. It is everything wrong with "market forces". The NFMPPB was set up by an act of congress, the Fluid Milk Promotion Act of 1990. More on this later). The companies compete, but I can find nothing in their competition beneficial to the consumer. Anyway, this industry is similar to the energy industry in that both are providing raw materials, and could, in my uninformed opinion, be owned by the government without any harm to consumers.

As I found in some quick internet research, these industries are profoundly influenced, even helped, by the government. The government regulates activities that are environmental concerns, gives contracts to companies to provide services for the government, helps in advertising and research (seeing as these industries provide essential public services), etc. Now, this seems like a lot of work to keep a minimal level of governmental involvement. The result seems mainly to be that the industries produce very rich companies with monopolies, who allow for small amounts of competition, and are occasionally massively harmful (Enron, cruel animal conditions, oil spills, pollution on the part of both industries, a trend toward unhealthy fast food, and so on almost ad naseum).

I'm getting too tired to continue writing, but I think I can now continue to read the newspaper at peace from my damn intruding thoughts.