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Top-level
 @RaffKarva @miki @albertcardona Ahhh... Myopic Maggie. The truth is, privatised 'public services', e.g. roads, rail, power, sewage ... are ALL cartels. That's it. There's nothing clever about it and every single one of them is ONLY interested in maximising profit. What on earth is the point??? 5 comments
@RaffKarva @miki @albertcardona Ha! Yes, I came up with 'Myopic Maggie' a few years ago, after ongoing discussions with a very old friend, who thought that Maggie was a true great. Sigh. It was her complete lack of vision. Her failure to understand humanity and the inevitability of her policies that led me the nickname. I was often heard in the late 80s saying ... 'just wait to see what this will lead to in 30yrs' ... and ... well, here we are today. Totally predictable. Poland is roughly a decade behind England in privatisation. Moreover, Poland did not adopt the full scale privatisation as introduced by Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism. A lot of my polish friends have this naive view of capitalism. They don’t see that given enough time privatisation always ends up with monopolies and/or cartels. Each time the public ends up paying more for worse product or service. @RaffKarva @miki @albertcardona When faced with this, I tend to ask a rhetorical question : "If you let people do what they want.. what will they do? This aspect of humanity, is where free markets and unrestrained capitalism fall apart. You can't let them do what they want, because some people are the shittiest narcissists you can imagine and they will do anything to get cash and as we all know... money=power=money=power... I often say: Circa 10% of humanity is naturally greedy. Circa 10% of humanity is naturally altruistic. The rest can be swung either way. Capitalism is set up by the greedy. |
Gregory's Server
@gsymon @miki @albertcardona
“Myopic Maggie” - I never heard that before. Good one.
Yeap, it’s always been this way with private companies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel?wprov=sfti1