Quote:
Originally Posted by Riverman
I don't know where this comes from. I have had an MTS phone for 10 years and there has not been one minute where it didn't work.
Governments do not belong in business, sorry.
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What do you define as business, though? In Canada healthcare is not business, but in the US it is. Municipal water service is almost entirely public in Canada, but is business in other countries.
What is defined as business vs public is arbitrary, and the line should be drawn around the public good. When profits are at odds with the public good, a service should be publicly-run. This goes for things such as the military, policing, firefighting, healthcare, roads, general infrastructure, etc.
The other situation where public service is superior is cases where the cost of entering a market/overhead/scale makes monopolies the best form of provider, such as insurance pools or utilities.
I think that when considering these sorts of issues you have to leave your ideological hat at the door. Selling off all crowns/public services is a bad idea, and so is keeping all crowns/services. Things like SLGA don't really need to exist, outside of money-making for the government. Having private stores allows better selection and pricing, and you can still enforce regulations if you want to socially-engineer against heavy public drinking (price controls). So I am in favour generally of private liquor stores (with regulations, I don't want whiskey in every corner store, for example, which makes it harder to control distribution/pricing). But in other cases such as the big 4 (Sasktel, Saskpower, Saskenergy, SGI), they exist in areas where the public good is best served by keeping them public.