[bhupy]

No, the point is that you no longer need to worry about sending profits to shareholders. "Business principles" are just a catch-all term for ideas that businesses need to co-opt in order to survive, including financial sustainability, effective leadership, producing results, operationalization, etc.

All of these things can and should apply to public utilities.

[uoaei]

"Business principles" does encourage a capitalist view into the problem, which necessitates growing capital as profit until you have surplus to invest in further growth. I think that's as far as you need to go with it -- utilities need to "play the game" because they're embedded in a capitalist system, but they are not subject to the same pressures regarding that profit and who decides what to do with it. It's not really a "business vs utility" dichotomy as much as it is a question of "where does the excess money go". You could argue they're the same thing but setting utilities up explicitly as "not businesses" encourages wonks to throw wacky ideas at the problem and doesn't do much to help the operations day to day.

[bhupy]

I mean, I don't think we can ever agree because "business principles" is a vague phrase that has no official definition. It can mean whatever you want it to mean.

More fundamentally, capitalist businesses try to maximize output of goods and services to consumers while minimizing the input necessary to create & produce them. The difference between the two, the profit, is the incentive to do more with less. This is how we allocate scarce resources to productive ends.

Municipal agencies are also bound by the constraints of resource scarcity. The goal should always be to efficiently provide services to citizens without glut/waste. You're right that municipal agencies shouldn't need to worry about turning a profit, but they should also need to make sure they don't run at a loss. If the input to a municipal service is (subsidized) price + tax revenue, the outlays of the municipal agency are bound by that input. Bonus points if the municipal agency is able to provide high quality goods & services with lower taxes.

The only way we know to accomplish all of this are through standard management practices which, today, are adopted by capitalist businesses.