Verily I say unto thee, that Andrew Halliwell spake thusly:
> IMO, things that keep the country running such as roads, rail and
> utilities should be nationalised, not privatised. And you saw the
> mess privatisation did.
>
> Oh dear, am I going to get a lot of wintrolls pointing at me and
> yelling "COMMUNIST" now?
>
> What a shame. It's not communism, it's common sense.
Absolutely.
Essential public services should not be subject to private exploitation,
since that represents a dangerous conflict of interests that compromises
those services. Market forces are apt to make access to certain services
prohibitively expensive, or worse, cause them to disappear entirely, and
what then? Can you imagine if Metropolitan Police Inc. decided to change
their business strategy to increase profits, by neglecting serious crime
like murder, in favour of pursuing more profitable ventures like traffic
violations, which procure spot fines?
Oh wait... hasn't that /already/ happened.
It seems the Tories did even more damage than we first realised, even to
those public services that were ostensibly /not/ privatised, through the
spread of a new paradigm that influenced those operators and managers in
both the private and public sectors. That paradigm was the self-interest
model (see the BBC documentary series: "The Trap").
Public services need to be operated in the /public's/ interest, but the
private sector simply does not have those interests at heart, and never
will. That's all well and good for shoe shops and restaurants, but that
simply won't work for essential public services like police, ambulance,
fire, military, and many other services which have already been tainted
by this new paradigm, such as telecoms, energy, and public transport.
Like you say, we've seen the results, and it's an utter disaster.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which
| the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf
| denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty.
| Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of
| the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today
| among human creatures." ~ Abraham Lincoln
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.26.8-57.fc8
13:08:43 up 57 days, 17:06, 4 users, load average: 0.17, 0.09, 0.03
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