Things I want Nationalising

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I've been out shooting for a good portion of the day, and there's been a few threads that are higher priority since none of this is going to happen in the near future. I'll try to get back to you on that tomorrow.

no it is'nt!

Thanks lenny77.

And Sean better answer or else.

All power tends to corrupt.

Absolute power corrupts ABSOLUTELY.

Kev729,
You cannot build a free and stable government through the UN because they can't be relied upon to do anything but sit on their thumbs all day. They do have ideas for world peace through global government. They could acheive peace that way, but they would be no less opressive than the governments they replace because they would restrict free sheech and violently supress any ppostion to their policies in the name of "peace". Such a "peace" would require brainwashing to an extent that the leader would be considered a deity like is the case in North Korea for anybody to be satisfied with such a system.

You can be a hippie despite being too young to be part of the original hippie movement. Successive generations have embraced hippie causes, and it never completely died out. We've even had an old hippie for a president before.

Lenny77,
I like your new avatar. It looks good on guns and other memorabilia sold in the US when the govenments that use that insignia fail.

Sean

I have never embraced the hippie culture nor has my family, or any hippie causes either.

We on the other hand do need to treat ALL OF HUMANITY BETTER THOUGH.

That is something that all World Governments Need to Do. Once the world governments do that we will all be better off.

HUMANITY WILL BE BETTER OFF AND EARTH WILL BETTER OFF FOR IT TOO.

you fon't have to be a hippie to actually care what happens to the planet and its people.

by the way, sean, your signature is... interesting. freud equated weapons (well, everything really) with the phallus or penis (depending on how much Lacan you can either agree with, or find comprehensible - and there ain't much of the latter). you might want to think about that. personally, i'd change your sig to read: "a fear of weapons is a fear of being shot", which seems perfectly healthy to me.

Back to nationalising things...

1) Health
In theory a nationalised health service sounds great. In practice, as we all know with the NHS is far from perfect. You can blame Thatcher all you like, but the truth is that the NHS is a huge unwieldy organisation (one of the world's largest) that will always be prone to internal inertia, inefficiency and interference from politicians trying to make the headline figures look good.
What if we privatised the whole lot of it, so they had to compete for your "business" but the state paid all the bills from the National Insurance fund? That would force higher standards across the board and a chuck out of the huge numbers of people employed to dawdle about forever in aimless meetings. Then, the health service would have to respond to what people want, and not what politicians and career-busybodies dictate.
Sure there might be some downsides to all this but the alternative is to throw increasing amounts of cash at the NHS uselessly to feed a bureaucracy that is starting to take up a life all of its own.

2) Education
Same as above. Private companies (with sponsorship and religious overtones banned) running schools that must compete for your money. Government picks up the tab. This means that if your child is bright enough, they can get in anywhere, excluding social prejudices, of course.

3) Welfare
As long as handouts aren't given out to those that actually don't need it, then fine, keep it nationalised.
However, couldn't private companies run the front-counter job centre stuff well? I think they could.

4) Emergency Services
5) Defense
This is a no brainer. The management and critical employees for these two areas has to be government run. However, I've no objection to the MoD or Police putting minor service side applications out to tender. Why shouldn't a private company run military canteens?

6) Transport
Like it or not, the trains have got better under privatisation, albeit with huge amounts of public money invested.
The only reason public transport is in such a shocking state overall (and I'm mostly talking about buses here) is because most people refuse to use it. Bus services won't be provided if the buses are always empty and going nowhere, no matter who runs the service. It's a chicken and egg situation, no buses services because people drive and people drive because there is no bus services. Local council subsides doesn't seem to help much with this issue either.

7) Water
Electricity
Explain exactly how either of these two critical services has got worse since privatisation? Truth is, they're doing just fine. There's no use complaining about huge profits going to shareholders. Those shareholders are us, via pensions and other investments.

9) Food
Don't be silly. Remember the USSR and bread lines...

10) Pharmaceuticals
No chance, the need to beat competitors to market helps push forward rapid advancement in medicine.

11) All contractors associated with nationalised services (i.e. cleaning staff must not be outsourced)
Why? What would that acheive? If there's been low standards in these services, it's because the nationalised organisation that employs them isn't being demanding enough.

12) Oil
What? And have poltiicans interfere more with this vital resource than they already do? No thanks! Next thing you'll be suggesting is
subsidising petrol at the pumps to keep prices down...

13) Renewable energy projects
Disagree. With spiralling enegry costs, you're going to see companies falling over themselves to invest into renewables, with or without government money. Just give it time.

I have always been wary of privatisation of all the services listed, for I believe (as a very general rule of thumb) that transferring the power to private investors has the ultimate effect of creating this sort of capitalist whirlpool whereby prices are allowed to rise too much (more than the rate of inflation), inequality rises and the government loses all control.
I think a lot of services become very institutional under public control, or at least, they develop their own culture which dictates how they manage things. When you apply an ill-concieved economic model without due care these structures are destroyed, and in short, the quality of service goes into decline. The best hard case for this is the UK British Railways, whose Intercity sector and infrastructure performed superbly under BR management, when now the highly specialised track engineering is in the hands of incompetent private companies. In my view, the trains are NOT better as a result of privatisation.
But I can only say all that being a passionate train enthusiast and I have less knowledge of how other key services like the NHS, water, blah, performed under public state.

Hmmm, you mean exactly like council tax in the public sector?

The only reason why council tax has gone up is because the councils no longer get sufficient money from Central Government. The Liberal Democrats had an ingenious way of sorting that at the last election but nobody took any notice. We were going to tax the rich more (50% for those earning over £100,000 per year) and use part of the proceeds from that to "axe" the council tax for ordinary families by creating a Local Income Tax based on ability-to-pay.

I noticed!

Yes I thought it was a fantastic idea too. However, it was badly portrayed in the media, concentrating on how multi-occupancy working age households would be hit so hard financially that they would have to buy less designer clothes and flash cars. Apparently the people who are genuinely suffering with the current system (like the old and poor) don't seem to matter to the media?

p.s. I am a Liberal Democrat supporter too (was once a member), which may surprise you given my views above!

Err... I suppose so...reading the last couple of posts I can see how that trend of 'capitalist whirlpool' applies to more than industry...but I feel rather out of my league here and I ostensibly need to read up on these ventures like the lib dem council tax proposal....

Food should never be nationalised it gives the goverment to much power over the peeple. If someone dosent agree with the powers that be, they can just be denied food if it got nationalised.

Same for health service too - think about the implications of only being able to get access to the NHS via an ID card?

That's bad enough as it is, but roll forward a few years and imagine it in a scenario of a time when civil rights have been completely eroded, and it's really quite frightening.