Because they are necessities of daily life for EVERYONE. Private companies can raise prices any time and price entire groups out of the market. Or private entities might decide tonight that the mail route that passes along your house is not economical anymore and stop serving your entire household. Laying power lines to your house or all sorts of other services might be denied to you because you don't fit into their efficiency algorithms. You might counter that there are many examples of overpriced and inefficient public services. You are right but as I said it depends on how the service is built up and with what intent and who manages those services. Many things in Japan take a lot of manual input to get going but once set up the services just work and work and work and serve everyone equally and at decent prices. But then there are also examples where private business competes with exceptional service. One such example is Yamato Kuronecko delivery service. They can deliver even frozen food from the most northern tip of Japan to the southernmost part at an amazing speed and price. If you have ever seen their employees with how much pride and attitude they do their job you will be absolutely blown away. Compare that to the average USPS or Canada Post worker and you want to run a bullet straight through their foreheads. I guess the answer to all this is very complicated. But I think a fundamental issue is humans dignity and pride in doing their job that really pushes quality levels to the top. When you allow cowboy get rich overnight schemes in your society then you disillusion a huge amount of people. You honestly think a nurse or police man or teacher is incentivized by their salary being exposed every single day to tons of those bullshit schemes in cryptos, stock market cowboys, get rich quick schemes, lottery winners, and I can name a hundred more. Point being is, if a society is built up mostly of admiring the rich then the poor will be disillusioned forever. If a society however embraces hard work, quality and effort and craftsmanship then this incentivizes anyone on the economic spectrum to do a good job. Japan is perfect proof of that. And this will then both apply to private and public sector services.
When looking at different countries and what works vs not, it's extremely important to remember cultural workforce differences....
@DiceAreCast I’m pretty much in alignment with you. I think it is important to hold government accountable, and that it needs to serve a very clear purpose. It strikes me that politics revolves around story and narrative, and not on competency and strategy, which means it is going to be skewed to populism and such.
The topic is a provocation, comrades. Report immediately. Those who do not report are subject to the "Not reporting crimes against State" penal code article and end up in a Magadan re-education camp of your jurisdiction. In the name of the common good, proletarian solidarity and socialist internationalism. Amen. P.S. "in nomine Patris et Fīliī et Spīritus Sanctī" is deprecated and deemed counter-revolutionary!
I think that has changed in the US as well. I used to live in the US for a while in the 90s, in the early 2000s and now a few years ago. I have noticed a huge difference. US back when I first moved there, was entrepreneurial, hard working and people were focusing on making a better future for their families. Things had changed slightly when I came back around 10 years later. But not that much. But forward another 15 years til the last time I moved over to the states, and it is not to recognise. US and a very large proportion of the population is changing very rapidly towards becoming a new EU / Europe. (I am European, but have an American wife and family over there, and have lived in the US for close to 10 years combined). The US of today is really changing, and is probably going thru the same change as you described for Canada. However, I believe it is going a lot faster. If I move back in another 10-15 years, I don't think there is much left of the good old American spirit.....