Free market sillyness

[MuswellHillDad]

www.cityam.com/article/1383618852/there-sadly-mass-support-nationalisation-and-price-controls?utm_source=website&utm_medium=TD_EditorsLetter_Homepage&utm_campaign=TD_EditorsLetter_Homepage

Allister Heath's blind support for the free market (City AM editor) has diminished his memory.

Can he imagine a more aggressive price control than "free at the point of need" that can survive 65 years of boom and bust and still cost less than it does in most other OECD nations (by % of GDP)?

Perhaps he has private healthcare to cover his dementia?

The NHS is the ultimate nationalisation and costs less than 10% of GDP. Healthcare in the exemplar of the free market, the USA, costs over 17% of GDP.

Is the free market always the bet medicine?

... Best medicine? ...

www.cityam.com/article/1383618852/there-sadly-mass-support-nationalisation-and-price-controls?utm_source=website&utm_medium=TD_EditorsLetter_Homepage&utm_campaign=TD_EditorsLetter_Homepage

Yeah, it's hilarious watching the neo-liberals in a panic.

The times are a changing, and people aren't going to put up with this shit for much longer.

Irrespective of your politics, I'd very much prefer you were more thoughtful in your use of the word "dementia" in your post title. For those of us who have family members with this disease, it seems wholly inappropriate.

To be fair, of those industries named in this article where there appears to be a clear cut majority in favour of renationalisation - energy companies, railways and Royal Mail - they were all the victims of botched privatisations in the first place.

Demerging energy producers and energy distributors has been shown that it would significantly lower household bills. Who is responsible for this balls up? The government when they botched the privatisation.

Creating a myriad of different companies to run the railways and separating maintenance, operations and infrastructure responsibility is an overly complex way of increasing costs whilst reducing safety. Who is responsible for this balls up? The government when they botched privatisation.

Selling off the profitable bits of Royal Mail before privatising the financial black hole that is the rump of the original company. Who's responsible for that balls up? The government.

Who do 70 odd percent of the population want to run these services? The government - will we never learn?

Apologies to ScuttleButter and any others who agreed. I don't know how to edit the title, but I would happily do so.

On the matter of energy policy, it is also somewhat irksome that the nuclear solution we need (?) to protect our free market energy pricing is being built by a utility owned by a socialist government funded by communists. Despite the huge debt burden we have, our govt can still borrow cheaper than private finance and long term borrowing is exactly what a long term infrastructure project needs. The economics of this are simple, but the politics seems to screw it up ever time.

MuswellHillDad

On the matter of energy policy, it is also somewhat irksome that the nuclear solution we need (?) to protect our free market energy pricing is being built by a utility owned by a socialist government funded by communists. Despite the huge debt burden we have, our govt can still borrow cheaper than private finance and long term borrowing is exactly what a long term infrastructure project needs. The economics of this are simple, but the politics seems to screw it up ever time.

The main reason for this is that the UK abandoned nuclear fission R&D. The rot started under Major but Labour really finished the industry off in the UK. Primarily (IMO) as a consequence of ecomentalist attitudes against nuclear and in favour of windmills and sunshine.

We need many many many new power stations over the next few decades. We have plenty of time to re-establish R&D, engineering and construction capability in that time. Yes it might take 5-10 years, but we should be doing it and the govt borrowing money to fund it.

Politicians are short sighted and conservatives even more so.

(PS - no fan of labour or lib dems either. In fact, they're all crap)

If you want to point a finger of blame, Labour were told about this problem in 2000. But they decided to skip it because there was an election and Gordon Brown wanted to spend money like a crack whore. Then they were reminded about the urgency of building new power stations, but there was lots of spending to be done on really urgent stuff like PFI and welfare and immigration.