Yesterday it took me three hours to get back home after work, instead of the normal 40 minutes. It was just another one of those train signal failure that forced me to take an underground to a different line, which took me to a different station, mot mine, but still a reasonable taxi ride from home.
Unfortunately, it’s not a rare occasion. Unfortunately, I know I won’t get compensated for the extra time or money I spent. Unfortunately, no one at work today agreed to put any money against me that such an occurrence will not happen again within a months.
The entire concept of privatisation of monopolies is senseless. Capitalism is based on competition. There is no competition to the trains. Without this, it is nothing but extortion:
- Governments use tax payers tax to build the train infrastructure for the benefit of the tax payers.
- Then the government decide they are more concerned about the quick money (to pay for Iraq war, for instance) so they forget that the tax payers paid for the train, and decide to sell it to the fat-cash-cow milking company that pays the highest bribe. (How can you sell something that belongs to the public, I am still not sure)
- The fat-cow milkmen, who borrowed the money to buy the cash cow, is now committed only to its shareholders. But this is easy, as they have a monopoly, they do not need to invest, all they need to do is take apart, destroy, under invest, and squeeze.Commuters? What are they?
- The utterly unhappy commuters are bad news before elections, so the government take the mandate away from the company, but leave them with the profits. After all it wasn’t public property anymore when they destroyed it.
- The government now find a skinny cash-cow milking company, to turn fa.
Are we back to the feudalistic system, that nobody matters but the landlords?
