Drastically reduced out of pocket costs from a lack of profit motive, and the ability to leverage this purchasing power to negotiate further savings with other participants in the supply chain.

It's a perfectly reasonable avenue to explore in core productive industries like energy and food.

The profit motive is what causes lower costs; where else would the margin come from? And it's also nice to not own PG&E considering how much debt they're in.

On the other hand, we don't let Medicare negotiate drug prices and the official policy is to just give them whatever they want. We rarely use our monopsony power as is. (This is finally changing as part of the IRA.)

The US military doesn’t have a profit motive, has massive leverage over most of its key suppliers, and yet I do not think anyone would list “cost control” among its virtues.

If it did, we'd save a lot of money purchasing tanks, guns, F-35s, drones, etc. from China.

The government regularly uses taxpayer funds to bail out or support failing private corporations anyway, so it's already our problem when private companies go into debt, why not force out the profit-seeking middle man?

> The government regularly uses taxpayer funds to bail out or support failing private corporations anyway,

IMHO this shouldn't happen. It's one of the most annoying ideological inconsistencies I find among the Republican party.

The political rhetoric centers on eliminating or reducing government regulations and privatization. Ok cool, it can be good in many sectors. There's a lot to be said about avoiding large bloated bureaucracies and undue government interference. However then as soon as the big banks or other big businesses get into trouble after engaging in risky behavior they're as eager as the Democrats to bail them out (well at least their favorites).

Personally I do believe in fiscal responsibility, and think it applies even more so at large corporate levels. You didn't plan and save enough in the boom times and spent record profits to do stock buybacks? Well perhaps your company should go into chapter 11 bankruptcy.

I think people don't realize that when a big business like say American Airlines goes into bankruptcy, it's rare that the airline and jobs will disappear. It often means the management of the company is booted with a chance for new ownership more competent management to take over. That's as it should be, IMHO. It's the weeding mechanism for free markets.

> so it's already our problem when private companies go into debt, why not force out the profit-seeking middle man?

That's generally not worked too well, unless it's fixed infrastructure like power, water, etc and those seem to work best at a state or county level. Then they're still structured as corporations, just ones that are publicly owned and locally managed.

No they don't. Those are usually loans, don't confuse a bailout with a loan. And don't assume equity holders do nothing but profit; if it fails they get nothing.

The airlines got one in 2020 because they have some of the largest union contracts in the country and we don't want to lose that, but that wasn't a pro-management thing.

On the other hand, a social wealth fund would be good, because it's less risky than owning individual companies.