Overstating the obvious.

nesf

Jackie laughlin wrote:

Nesf,
I take it you mean that you have no objection in principle to the state owning and running an enterprise.

Essentially, I’ve no objection in principle to the state owning and running enterprises that the private sector couldn’t provide. Generally speaking these are enterprises that provide public goods. The Government should always own the railways in my opinion, along with the power distribution network and it should provide roads (though it doesn’t necessarily need to provide and maintain all of them) and similar. The Government shouldn’t necessarily own the power companies or the train companies. Private companies will never build roads or lay power lines out to villages in remote rural areas because they’d never make a profit out of it, the Government need to step into this gap.

Arguably the Government should also heavily sponsor R&D in areas that we’ll benefit from and not only leave it to the private sector to do all of the innovation (though arguably the private sector is more efficient at doing it).


Where I disagree with a lot of more left wing thinking is in that I believe that the Government should be relatively “small”. If the private sector can do the job it should be left do the job. Some things it will never be able to provide fairly and that’s where the Government needs to step in but it shouldn’t automatically do things. The problem here is that people think that we should have an Irish plant for everything and not use foreign plants to recycle our waste. Personally I think that if a bottling plant in Northern Ireland can recycle our waste for us at a cheaper price than if we ran our own plant that we’d be foolish not to use it. On the other hand if we could recycle the waste cheaper ourselves we’d be foolish not to set up a plant here (be it public or private depending on which is needed).

Jackie laughlin

Nesf,
I'm way off topic but I reckon that you are a socialist; you seem to believe in a mixed economy. Very few do these days. My few remaining doubts about your politics can be easily cleared up.

Having established a profitable state enterprise, is it a matter of principle that it be privatised?

When a private enterprise capitalises on State investment (your money and mine) in roads, R&D etc, should they be expected to put something back?

If it could be shown that direct labour (state employment) produced a better and/or cheaper product/outcome, should that be the course taken?

By the way, you can't be serious about private/competing train companies in the light of Britain's experience; there's now huge state subsidy to run fantastically inefficient and dangerous services.

Moreover, you do realise that ESB prices have been RAISED in order to encourage private competition?