On the question of what it means for something to be the subject of a discussion It is perfectly possible to reach a meaningful conclusion about whether businesses or the state do better at running a railway network: if you thought that it wasn't, you wouldn't have your own view on the subject.
If it were possible then there would be no need for discussion.
The implicit assumption in that statement that there can only be a meaningful discussion of subjects on which no meaningful conclusion is possible is bizarre. What would the function of a discussion on a subject on which it is imossible to reach a meaningful conclusion be? I have already explained why it would not be worth discussing the topic (and, indeed, conceptually, there could not
be a topic to discuss) if it were not one on which it was in principle possible to reach a meaningful conclusion. You do not seem to have engaged with those reasons in the assertion of the contrary. It is not clear why.
The important and relevant thing about politics is that one can only adopt one set of policies at a time. Railways cannot simultaneously all be nationalised or all be in independent ownership. There is a choice to be made, and it matters to people's lives which choice is made because the outcomes of each choice will be different and in all probability the outcomes of one choice worse than the other for people overall. If you didn't believe that that were so, it would be irrational to hold a political view on the subject one way or another, and bizarre to be advancing such a view in public. To hold a political view inherently and necessarily means that you believe that the consequences adopting the policies that you favour would be better than the consequences of adopting other policies or otherwise not adopting them. Indeed, in putting forward what you claim are reasons for your views in favour of stateism, you have relied upon claims of what constitutes the public good, for example:
Nationalising the commanding heights (at least) of the economy allows them to be used for the greater good rather than serve the interests of the few.
Those affected by state policy can meaningfully ask for, and are properly entitled to, a better explanation than "it's just my opinion that things should be done that way" when subjecting whoever is in office to scrutiny as to the reasons that it acts as it does (and does not act in other ways). It is no more a meaningful retort to the most carefully considered critique of the Beeching axe that it is all just a matter of opinion and it's impossible to reach a meaningful conclusion about whether it was a good thing or not than it is to retort in the same way to my explanation of why there is a unique and specific and very real danger in the state being both regulator and actor in the same domain. If anyone actually in office were, in response to serious criticism of some policy decision that had a serious adverse impact on scores of thousands of people that it was all just a matter of opinion and that one cannot reach a meaningful conclusion one way or another as to whether the policy was a good one or not, one would rightly think that the office holder was being evasive to the point of deliberate dishonesty in purposely failing to engage with well founded criticisms of her or his policy. There is no possible reason to apply a differnet standard to the theoretical discussion of which policy ought be adopted.
The problem of being methodological as you suggest is where to stop:
You say that companies don't have opinions, which is true, but individuals have. Are you sure of this? What is my opinion but the result of the firing of millions of neurons? So, I don't have an opinion, but neurons do. But, wait a second, neurons are made of molecules, don't they?
Why you say something inherently different in the way in which I have been explaining... What is the meaning of I? You yourself now, here. Or you yourself tomorrow? Do you control all your thoughts? Even the subconscious? Even all your hidden motivations and feeling you don't even know about?
Are those questions on which we actually disagree? And, if so, is the disagreement on them relevant to the disagreement in the question of whether railways ought be state owned? If the answer to either of those questions is "no", then entering into those discussions will not be worthwhile in this context. Those two questions are the limiting parameters of the extent to which it is worthwhile discussing methodology in this context: it is worthwhile discussing it if and in so far as differences in methodology account for the differences in views on the practical, applied matter on which we expressed disagreement in the first place.
As to the question of whether there is "an absolute good", as noted above, politicians have to make individual decisions which affect a very large number of people and can only be made in more than one way simultaneously. I am not sure precisely how you intend "absolute" to qualify "good" here, but rather doubt that the concept to which you refer is in fact the one on which I rely when stating that it is possible to reach meaningful conclusions about whether one policy or another ought to be adopted.
Indeed, I can put the question starkly - do you agree or disagree that it is possible to reach a meaningful conclusion about what policies ought to be adopted? If you do, then the methodological discussion is probably an irrelevance. If you do not, why do you think that it matters whether railways are run by private companies, the state or the local rotary club? We could spend a very, very long time indeed discussing the ultimate foundations of ethical philosophy - let's not get into that unless there is a relevant disagreement the resolution of which is requisite to dealing with the ultimate practical issue at stake.
Before leaving methodology, a comment on this:
You speak as being rational as the only way to discuss matters. But in politics, rationality is not the only (I would guess not the main) tool used to decide something. Much on the contrary, you can hear a country to support one thing or the opposite few month apart depending on what other country says it, for instanc
Reason is the only proper way to discuss things. That people are sometimes irrationally motivated does not justify people acting irrationally. By definition, people cannot be justified in acting irrationally (as, if the action had a real justification, it could not be said to be truly irrational). The nature of the discussion is about what can be justified. One might equally say, "You speak as if not murdering people is the only way to live; but, in life, not murdering people is not the only way that people go about their lives...".
In any event, it is not meaningfully possible to argue against reason, for arguing necessarily and inherently assumes the primacy of reason: argument, by definition, is an exercise in reason. Doing something that appears to be arguing but is not, in fact, founded on reason usually amounts to either dishonesty or aggression in one form or another.
On the substantive question of the merits or otherwise of state owned railwaysThe knowledge that parts of the railway network are not, will not be, and never have been profitable and will therefore require a subsidy.
That this subsidy is paid for by the government using revenue from taxpayers.
That this subsidy should be used to operate the railway, not generate profit for shareholders.
That for protecting the environment it is best to improve the share of transport that uses railways compared to roads.
That a national network offers the best chance of increasing passenger numbers by giving easy connections.
That a single private company operating a national network would abuse this position to inflate profits by demanding higher subsidy.
The first three have not held for a majority of the history of railways. There were some parts of the network that were unprofitable in themselves but contributed to the profitability of other parts by being feeder routes, and therefore were worthwhile for private companies to keep. Indeed, ignoring this was one of Beeching's most crass errors. (Interestingly, this principle can be readily simulated in Simutrans)
If you think that there are special reasons in the modern age why a subsidy of some sort that is not provided by the cross-subsidisation of different parts of a coherent but independently owned network (and, if so, you have not explaiend what that reason is nor what empirical evidence that there is in support), why does that subsidy have to come directly from the state? Doing so gives rise to the real danger that the state will (as indeed it frequently did and continues to do repeatedly) abuse its power for the short-term political interest of the politicians making the decisions. If a subsidy of some sort is really needed, and further if that subsidy is of such a level that can only come by way of being forced out of people by the coercive mechanism of the state, why is state ownership of the thing that is being subsidised (and, by implication, all such things, such as to create an almost Stalinist state megalith capable of abuse of power on a vast scale) rather than there being a simple requirement that people give a certain proportion of their incomes to charity (where such charities can include public transport concerns where the service cannot be run commercially), so that there is an effective split between the regulator of economic activity and the economic actors?
The argument about a monopoly provider having the best chance of increasing passenger numbers by providing easier connexions is unsupported. People managed perfectly well before nationalisation (when a far higher proportion of people travelled by train). Nationalisation does not in fact guaruntee this benefit (even when both were in national hands, rail and 'bus ticketing was never integrated), and such benefits can be obtained by measures short of nationalisation, including regulation or the simple co-operation of companies in their mutual interests.
On a national level the cost of providing a rival service is impossibly high. Because there can be no effective competition in providing the infrastructure the owner is required to allow other companies to use their infrastructure for a fair price.
Exactly this aim was achieved long before anyone ever dremt of nationalisation by the expedient of joint running powers in certain locations, although it should be noted that
before the Beeching devasation (and, less remembered, but also true, to a greater extent still before the state-imposed grouping) there was in fact far more in the way of parallel rail infrastructure than there is now (although some still exists, for example, between London and Birmingham or London and Southend).
But, throughout its history, the railways' main competitor has not been other railways (although, for long distance routes, this was significant: witness the spread of comfort cascading from one network to the next after James Allport's monumental decision in 1875 to abolish second class on the Midland and convey third class passengers in second class comfort for less than the previous third class fare), but from other modes of transport: canals in the early days, road and air in more recent times. Even in the decades between the demise of canals and the introduction of trams then the motorisation of road transport, where rail held a monopoly of transport in many inland areas, it was recognised that the sort of conflict inherent in permitting railways to be used in the way that canals had been before them (with the owning companies not allowed to run their own services upon them) was impractical. (It ought be noted that the enabling Act for the original Stockton and Darlington Railway did indeed contain such a provision, and even went so far as to permit any local land owner to build private sidings to connect to the railway, but it was soon found that the true efficiency of rail could not be achieved without a single organisation being in charge of both infrastructure and operations, and thus was born the railway company, an institution that faithfully served the public for well over a century). There is far more competition for railways now than there was in what is often regarded as the golden age of railways, on which nationalisation certainly did not improve. The railway companies were, in fact, far more effective in their competition with rival modes than the nationalised railways (after all, they had incentive to promote rail in particular: the government had no such incentive), the Southern's electrification programme in the pre-war period, for example, being far more rapid than that of British Rail(ways) in the post-war period.
It is not an argument, it is used to support one. What is your experience and evidence that all politicians always act out of self interest?
I have not claimed that
all politicians
always act out of self interest. That would obviously be false. What I have written is that there is no reason to believe that politicians are any less inclined to favour their own personal interests over those of the common good than businesspeople. The suggestion that politicians are ultimately accountable to voters and will therefore do whatever is in voters' interests, whereas businesspeople are accountable to shareholders and will therefore always do whatever is in shareholders' (pecuniary) intersts is simplistic to say the least.
First of all, there is substantial and clear evidence (see
Fixing the Game by Roger Martin for the research and analysis) that directors of large companies' interests are very often not aligned to shareholders' interests at all, and that measures made popular from the 1970s onwards that seek better to align the two interests have in fact had the opposite effect, with the result that company directors will often, for example, deliberately engineer a fall in the company's share price so as to make it appear that a subsequent recovery was as a result of some ingenious work on their part justifying higher remuneration, or alternatively increase a company's short term profits so as to boost its share price temporarily, resign the directorship, sell the shares whilst they are valuable, and do the same at some other company, leaving the shareholders with a company that has been set up to increase profit in the short term in ways that might very well damage its profitability in the long-term. The posited solution to this issue, incidentally, is precisely the sort of state as umpire regulation by general rules rather than executive fiat discussed above, the very sort that is quite impossible to apply to the state itself as economic actor because of the inherent conflict of interest.
The point is also flawed for quite another reason, which is that the interests of shareholders and the interests of consumers are very often aligned in any event by the processes of basic economics described by Adam Smith with which I assume that you are very familiar. The better that a company serves its customers, the more inclined that customers will be to use its services, and the more revenue that the company will generate. The identity of intersts is not by any means perfect, but there is no reason to believe that it is any more imperfect than the similarly posited identity of interests between politicians and those who elect them; and, further, many of the possible abuses that might arise out of the lack of that identity of interest (obvious examples being false advertising, taking money and failing to provide a promised service in return, delivering a service below the promised standard, etc.) are just the sort of abuses that it is the
raison d'etre of the state, in its role as neutral regulator of the economy, to resolve by means of the promulgation of the rule of private law.
Similar considerations apply to politicians' relationship with voters as do with directors' relations with shareholders and direcotrs' or shareholders' relations with consumers: the mere fact of having a general election every five years is not sufficient to cause politicians to be motivated to act only in the interests of all those who are eligible to vote. I have already explained (which explanation I note has not attracted any attempts at counter-argument) that an election on every possible topic of politics once every five years is the most blunt possible instrument to give feedback for something as specific and niche as the running of the railways. Can you think of a single election that you can properly say was won or lost on the performance of the respective political parties on the issue of railways (or even transport in general)? Voters have a single, often binary, choice every five years about a whole range of topics, most of which will be considered to be more important than the railways, and, critically, as the actions of the government in the early 1950s demonstrated with its artificial suppression of fare prices, can be cynically traded off against areas that appear to the voters to be more important, such as the economy. Politicians, just like the errant company directors described in Roger Martin's work, engage in a reckless spending spree to garner popularity for the next election, then have no money left with which to run essential services, resulting in severe cutbacks to whichever of them is least politically sensitive; or alternatively make short-term cuts to services to raise money to spend on other areas which it calculates will make it more popular with voters overall at the next election (no matter what the long-term impacts of such fickle funding end up being - usually disasterous). Such abuses are the daily digest of modern stateist politics, to such an extent that many politicians would not even see them as abuses, but abuses they are, and untold harm has been done to the national interest because of them. They would all be quite impossible were the state constitutionally prohibited from being involved in the economy in that way (which is realisitcally the only safe way of preventing a future government cynically taking things into state ownership with the express intention of such cynical exploitation).
Indeed, none of this requires politicians to be self-consciously cynical in the way that you might imagine: you might, if you had listened to Radio 4 this evening, have heard a very interesting talk by somebody who has conducted research into the physical changes that occur in the brains of people who are given significant power, who increasingly tend to focus solely on abstract ends and care less about the means by which they are achieved, and who can become in some cases quite literally addicted to the biochemical consequences of power, the combination of which two factors can lead to what to an outside observer would be considered enormously cynical behaviour, but which the individual often feels able to justify on the basis that, if he or she is able to retain power for just a little longer, he or she can do more good than whatever harm is done to retain it. More than that, the sort of trading off which I described above is unlikely to be thought of by those who engage in it as abuse, and they are likely to justify it to themselves on the ground that the area that benefits is more worthwhile than the area that suffers (without being able to realise that all areas suffer in the long-term because of the propensity of successive governments to conduct such tradeoffs inconsistnetly and with a short-term outlook governed by election timetables).
All of that goes without even mentioning the point that politicians, in order to retain their office, only need to court the votes of undecided voters in marginal constituencies.