Controversy over highway tolls
Every year during the Spring Festival, how to drive home or back is a problem. The key to this problem is the free policy of highways. The free expressway on holidays is recognized as a policy that is beneficial to people's livelihood, but this policy is also a market-destroying action, and he is a typical case of direct intervention in the market by administrative order.
He did not say that it illustrated a reality, ** can issue an order at any time to intervene in the specific business actions of the enterprise, ** can order an enterprise at any time not to charge and provide services free of charge. The essence of the highway is still the enterprise. The charging of high-speed companies is still a kind of business operation, and interfering with the charging of enterprises is still an action that destroys the market.
Different points of view:
Of course, there are many people who disagree with me.
The first point of view is that foreign countries are advanced, and you see that most highways in the United States are free of tolls, and non-toll highways are the performance of developed countries.
The second view is that most of the expressways are run by state-owned enterprises, they have a monopoly on the operation of expressways, their tolls are not reasonable, and it is understandable to ask them to be free of charge.
The third view is that if everyone buys gasoline and pays for the maintenance of the road, then the highway should be free. 
These views ignore the facts:The vast majority of China's expressways are directly operated by listed companies, and there are a large number of listed companies in China's expressways, including: Yantian Port (000088), Guangdong Expressway A (000429), Hunan Investment (000548), Shanxi Road and Bridge (000755), Dongguan Holdings (000828), Urban Development Environment (000885), Hainan Expressway (000886), China Merchants Highway (001965), Wantong Expressway (600012), Zhongyuan Expressway ( 600020), Fujian Expressway (600033), Chutian Expressway (600035), etc. Since it is a listed company, it is no longer a pure state-owned enterprise, but a joint-stock enterprise, in which the interests of countless small shareholders are involved, and the use of administrative orders to require these enterprises not to charge fees is actually to prohibit them from collecting money and requiring them to pay costs when their business is at its best.
This kind of action is a clear and unambiguous intervention in the property rights of enterprises.
Even if these enterprises are pure, 100 percent owned state-owned enterprises, they should oppose this kind of administrative interference.
Why? The essence of market-oriented reform is a change in concepts
The most important thing in the reform of state-owned enterprises is a change in concept, and the most important change in concept is that whether it is state-owned or privately owned, it should first be an enterprise. Before the reform and opening up, state-owned enterprises were not enterprises, they were just a ** institution, although he had factories that would produce, but this production was not aimed at profits, but was produced entirely according to administrative orders, that is, the planned economy model.
When state-owned enterprises return to the essence of enterprises and aim at pursuing profits, the state-owned enterprises at this time will destroy the economy far less than the state-owned enterprises under the planned economy model.
If the public's demand for state-owned enterprises is that of an organization that is self-responsible for its own profits and losses and is entirely aimed at pursuing profits, then it will inevitably find that the current situation of unclear property rights of state-owned enterprises will prevent them from obtaining more profits, and then the shareholding system reform of state-owned enterprises will inevitably come to the surface. In other words, the reform of state-owned enterprises can only take place if enterprises are treated as profit-seeking institutions. On the contrary, if the profit mechanism of SOEs is eliminated, then the reform of SOEs will not be able to move forward.
Whether SOEs should be profit-seeking institutions is an important dividing line in the conceptual debate.
Preventing state-owned enterprises from making money is the key to the failure of state-owned enterprise reform
If the business operated by state-owned enterprises is changed back to a certain kind of first-class function, then the reform of state-owned enterprises will be far away, and requiring free passage of expressways during the Spring Festival is a means of socializing the functions of state-owned enterprises. This means will bring a lot of people to support state-owned enterprises, they will say, only when the enterprise is in the hands of the first, the enterprise occupation is not only for profit, then the value of the enterprise to the society is the greatest.
They will start a debate on the Internet, you see that the state-owned enterprises serve everyone for free during the Spring Festival, can you do it privately?
The reason why it is difficult for all state-owned enterprises to carry out market-oriented reform is because the reform of state-owned enterprises is not thorough, so that state-owned enterprises have the function of first-class distribution, so that they have not become pure enterprises in the market.
Since you ask me to provide services for free, then you should give me privileges in loans, for example, I want to get the first batch of over-issued currency and take advantage of the time difference in inflation to make a profit. Or, I should be subsidized from my taxes. This kind of action has further moved state-owned enterprises further away from marketization. And the people will also tolerate state-owned enterprises with huge losses, saying that the reason why they lose money is because they subsidize the people, and state-owned enterprises that do not aim to make money can solve the problems that private enterprises cannot solve.
The value of a business can only be assessed in terms of profits
The real question remains in the concept, that is, how to evaluate the value of an enterprise. Only when the public knows that the value of an enterprise is the size of its profits, will people reflect on the issue of state-owned enterprises. The size of profit is the size of the enterprise's ability to serve consumers, while the loss-making enterprise is a waste of the means of production, the wrong allocation of resources, and should be eliminated by the market. 
We have repeatedly said that we should use the principle of rule of law and marketization, and treat state-owned enterprises and private enterprises equally. This kind of treatment not only refers to the protection of private enterprises, but also includes the protection of the functions of state-owned enterprises.
As long as state-owned enterprises and private enterprises enjoy the same treatment in the market, no one has privileges, no one is subject to interference, and everyone has the right to set prices freely, then the reform of state-owned enterprises can be carried out in a more market-oriented direction. It is precisely because no one cares about the losses and profits of highway companies that they will invest a lot in various highways without output, resulting in huge waste.
It is precisely because the profit target is ignored that China's highways have been in a state of loss for a long time, and enterprises have no motivation to improve their losses.
If SOEs are defined as institutions that do not need to make profits, or even if losses become a kind of honor, then SOE reform can never be pushed forward, because the reason for the reform is lost.
The reason why SOEs need to be reformed is because they are losing money, or because they use their privileges to maintain their apparent profits. If a state-owned enterprise can make profits in the market without relying on privileges, there is indeed no need for reform.
The basis of reform is not ownership, but ideasSome people say that it is not enough to eliminate state-owned enterprises? This perception is too simplistic.
The real reform is the concept. Even if state-owned enterprises are eliminated, the private sector will be intervened as long as it is perceived that the enterprise cannot become a purely profit-generating institution.
Demanding that private companies assume social responsibility and regulate private companies is happening all over the world, and it is not the key to who the property rights belong to.
Only when people realize that the profit of enterprises is the cornerstone of social civilization, and all civilization is protected by the profit mechanism and all wealth growth is protected by the profit mechanism, then the problem of state-owned enterprises will only be a small problem. At present, the reform of China's state-owned enterprises is facing a critical turning point. For example, public hospitals began to characterize public welfare and no longer allowed the existence of profit mechanisms;
For example, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala is also weakening corporate and commercial attributes step by step.
The profit mechanism will bring about the expansion of supply and more satisfaction for consumers at any time and in any kind of organization, and as long as this mechanism is recognized by the public, then it is inevitable that these public and state-owned institutions will develop in the direction of creating profits. The antipathy to the profit mechanism and the antipathy to the state-owned enterprises making money only brought people's negation of the profit mechanism, and finally pushed the existing state-owned institutions that brought the profit mechanism to the first mechanism. This kind of regression is essentially a conceptual regression.
Regression of ideas inevitably leads to confusion
We can compare the efficiency of state-owned enterprises and private enterprises under the profit mechanism, but we cannot compare the efficiency of a first-class enterprise with an enterprise under the profit mechanism, which will bring confusion in concepts. If state-owned enterprises move closer to the market-oriented mechanism, then more reforms will inevitably be needed, including the shareholding system, the professional manager system, and the marketization of employment. If state-owned enterprises move closer to the first-class mechanism and become production under the first-class mechanism, they will move closer to the planned economic model, which will be an economic disaster. The various reforms that are now being promoted by public hospitals are pointing in this direction. The number of surgeries performed by hospitals is declining, their profit mechanisms for serving consumers are being destroyed, and if they do not change, a significant decline in the quality of care is just around the corner. 
The reason for this is that the negation of the profit mechanism by the private sector is one of the important reasons for the regression of the reform from marketization to marketization.
The freezing rain and road closure of the highway before the holiday is also a manifestation of the gradual disappearance of the profit mechanism of enterprises. There is a large number of vehicle congestion, and the biggest loss is the business, because his charges are rapidly reduced. However, in the face of this kind of disaster, highway enterprises basically did not play a role before and after, indicating that these enterprises have become **. The real market-oriented reform is not only public and private, but universal marketization, and the use of law-based means for each market entity to protect its ability to create profits within the scope of property rights. The protection of the profit mechanism of monopolies is also a marginal improvement
Even an administrative monopoly would be better off than no profit mechanism if it protected its profit mechanism. Although the administrative monopoly uses administrative power to eliminate competitors, as long as the enterprise relies on the voluntary purchase of consumers and the profit of the enterprise is the best for the consumer, then such a corporate profit is not a tax, and he must rely on producing more and better to make higher profits. One should recognize the significance of marginal improvement, and at any time, increasing the profit mechanism will be conducive to the development of enterprises in the direction of serving consumers. The progress of people's ideas is also gradual, and if we agree with the profit mechanism, then all reforms will inevitably move in this direction.
If a policy and document is issued, a certain type of enterprise is not allowed to charge, or not let them operate, this is the destruction of the profit mechanism, whether the enterprise is a state-owned enterprise or a private enterprise, this is the first action to intervene in the market, is not enough rule of law, not enough market-oriented performance.