"can't afford" in this case is a choice to spend the absolute minimum possible on school lunches.

And despite spending basically nothing on that lunch, we still charge kids for it

The public blamed the "lazy" lunch ladies of course but the public was the one voting down the school budget to actually pay them to cook. The actual people doing food service have as much agency over the menu as the teen behind the counter at mcdonalds. Those exact same women WERE cooking real food a decade ago. That's how long they had been doing that job.

The one advantage Ryanair has over non-budget airlines is that none of their seats recline.

The more you concentrate taxation via capital gains, the more you incentivise the type of tax strategy where people just leave the state/country before cashing out. Countering that with exit taxes and such is hard.

Taxing company profits directly may be less efficient from an economics point of view but it's much more politically palatable.

> competition always leads to lower prices

I don't see how this could be true for emergency visits. Would an ambulance drive you to the cheapest hospital within some fixed radius?

Hospitals typically lose money on emergency visits and make it back on scheduled inpatient care and outpatient services. This would accelerate a poor performing hospital's demise, because ambulances will go to the closest one but patients who have options will look elsewhere.

If you now have two ERs within driving range, you have the choice to go to the cheaper one if you are conscious and in a stable enough condition to reflect. This is the sort of thing people already think about in the US.

Comparing the total size of countries like this never made much sense to me.

It's not like Americans need to drive coast-to-coast to buy groceries or drop their kids off at school.

> What is “fake insurance?”

Do you believe Ro Marine would have paid out claims related to their "insured" vessels?

It’s ironic that after British Rail was privatized, many UK rail services ended up being run by subsidiaries of other European state railways: French SNCF, Dutch NS, Italian Trenitalia, and so on. Turns out the state knows something about running trains after all.

For a while Abellio ran rail services in Scotland - they were absolutely awful and things got a lot better almost immediately the Scottish Government terminated their franchise.

This strategy would save them having to issue food vouchers at the airport, but not delay compensation per se which is based on arrival time at the destination gate.

I'd be curious to hear LG's defence. Presumably they must have taken the line that they weren't liable for their product self-combusting in the middle of the night.