This quote, via Bloomberg, reveals what privatisation has always been about:
Slovene Prime Minister Miro Cerar says a few open issues are making it hard for euro-area leaders to reach an accord in new Greek bailout talks.
"One open question is the formation of an international fund for Greece that would supervise the privatization in Greece, it's about the use and the availability of funds that would result from privatization".
Privatisation has always been about dismantling the state and handing it to bankers and their friends.
That's what is being fought over in Greece. The question that the EU is asking is how much should the bankers get as Greece is torn to shreds.
The right of the state is at the heart of the Greek crisis. And if the bankers win they will expect to do so again, and again, and again.
No wonder I believe in QE, where the state owns its own debt. And in green infrastructure quantitative easing most of all.
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The demise of the State has been a libertarian goal for many years and the consequences have been considered. I offer a quotation from the prophet of profit, Prof. Nozick in Anarchy, State & Utopia, Part 2 – Beyond the minimal State, Ch 9
“Some of these people desirous of more money hit upon the idea of incorporating themselves, of raising money by selling shares in themselves.”
Followed a few paragraphs later by
“Perhaps no persons completely sell themselves into slavery, or perhaps the protective associations do not enforce such contracts. At any rate, there are at most only a few complete slaves.”
So nothing to worry about?
I think we have to disagree here: the state is an essential infrastructure for enforcing debt repayments and other rents exacted by the rich upon the population.
The privatisation of a function of the state is no more or less than the purchase of a rent, to be exacted on the users of a service that they thought they ‘owned’ but had mistakenly entrusted to a servant of the powerful who sold their common property for gain.
The state was once regarded as the expression of a common will of the citizens, and as a vehicle for those tasks and trusts which are better carried out in common and removed from the arena of competing induviduals and companies.
I think that your view of the state is quite close to that outdated view: and the rich have almost finished dismantling that.
But they rich have many uses for the state, as they consider it to be: a tool for their protection, and the coercion of all others to the service of their interests, and an enforcer for the payment of their rents.
I am happy to retain my view
And agree with you that it has been subverted
I’ve just read this in The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/13/david-cameron-open-to-workers-saving-up-fund-own-sick-pay
This is just the start. They’ve only just started to warm their backsides on the new chairs they’ve got in Cabinet.
Greece and its poor are the deliberately-isolated laboratory where the “existing methods” are being honed to perfection. But it’s not a thought experiment. The ruling classes of Europe are very interested, for reasons of their own survival, in how this develops.
Owning your own debt is a required, but still insufficient condition for social progress. We need more than courageous politicians. We need a different class of people altogether.
It’s getting worrying faster than I thought it would