Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolven
I'm not. We just are not agreeing on the outcome.
You've already decided that the solution will fail because.... it must fail?
I've decided it can succeed and that there are much larger opportunities for benefits than just opening a public grocery store.
The biggest risk is that whatever government implements the solution would need to stay in power for a couple of terms to allow it enough runway to mature. Otherwise some corporatist party would come in with a sledgehammer and break it immediately so that their corporate friends can get back to pillaging us for profits.
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I guess my question to you is where do you see the benefits coming from?
Empire Co (owner of Safeway and Sobeys) had sales of $31.4 billion and profits of $700 MM in the trailing twelve month period. So if your baseline is the government coule be as efficient as the private sector and could operate with zero profits you could drop food prices 2.2%.
Of course, they've invested ~$12 billion in property, plant and equipment to get that result, so to duplicate the real estate base you have to spend all that money first (and probably much more - not that likely their real estate has gone down in value...)
If you just want to subsidize people with tax dollars you can do that, but then why spend tens of billions setting up infrastructure - just use direct deposit.
And of course, the government isn't going to do all those bad things to boost profits, so the savings will be smaller. Then you have the cost of bureaucratic oversight and less aggressively negotiated labour contracts. Hard to see there being any savings at all.