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punk rebel ecks posted:Fantastic post. I really would like to know more about the nationalized industries. Were they all bad but NHS? Why were they bad? Could they have been fixed? Hopefully someone could chime in. Well, first the NHS isn't a nationalised industry. But the nationalised industries weren't bad and nationalisation isn't bad. Their main drawback was that they sacrificed quality for price. You can get any level of quality you want from a nationalised service so long as the government are willing to spend the money on it, but it's the taxpayer's money and there's only so much you can spend on it before the taxpayer feels ripped off and votes for someone else. So British Rail, for example, provided an acceptable if not brilliant service at a good price. But then enter Thatcher saying "Let's sell off the rail network - private companies can take care of all the infrastructure and provide a better service, and people can pay less tax". Sounds good, right? Well, it's actually a perfect example of what happens when the free market is given control. The rail network was sold off, but as nobody could possibly afford it all it was sold as partial franchises. And of course you can't run two trains on the same track, so those franchises had to be exclusive. Hence the franchises have no incentive to improve service and they can charge what the market will bear, because they're the only game in town. The net result is a rail service that is far worse than it was when nationalised, at a far higher cost to the traveller.
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Mar 24, 2016 20:22
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duckmaster posted:This is wrong. Thatcher was strongly against privatising British Rail and had repeatedly shouted it down when members of her own cabinet kept suggesting it. This was one of the factors which led to Michael Hesseltines leadership challenge in 1990 and her virtually immediate resignation. John Major somehow won the leadership contest and became (unelected) Prime Minister in 1990. He couldn't start the privatisation process as it hadn't been in the Conservative manifesto in 1987, so it was put in for the 1992 election which he also somehow won. Major, Norman Lamont and to an extent John Redwood couldn't wait to get their grubby little paws on the railways and somehow managed to sell off the entire network within a year. I'll accept the correction, I thought she was in on it. It was definitely an extension of her policies, though.
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Mar 25, 2016 10:04
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Tesseraction posted:Ooh you would enjoy a history of the post-WW2 Germany scene. One of the few countries to have a militant left of note. Heck, check out the Wikipedia page on the Rote Army Fraktion / Red Army Fraction. The RAF were hardly left wing. As pretty accurately summed up by a Not the Nine O'clock News sketch of the time, they were what happens when a couple of sociopathic fanatics convince young people that direct action - by which we mean "killing people you don't like" - is just as valid a route to becoming a socialist as actually studying Marxist theory. Communism wasn't the reason for the RAF, it was the excuse.
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Mar 28, 2016 12:17
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Tesseraction posted:True enough, and I do love that sketch. It was very much a naïve anti-establishment mentality that preyed on people upset with the status quo. I dug it out now I'm not phone posting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDJeTnLKLEI
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Mar 30, 2016 23:29
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