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I agree with you. But a combination of government and free market does not work.
The free market complains about unfair competition and the government is falling behind.
The problem is, how do you ensure that the government keeps vital infrastructure up to date, regardless of the political wind? How do you ensure that there is no favoritism involved that causes wrong decisions to be made?
In the commercial world, shareholders deal with bad directors and (that is the theory, not always practice) keeping your customer satisfied is vital to the survival of your company. This ensures a reasonable balance between profit and customer interests\investment.
As a difficult example, look at the NS. It is a private company in which the government has 100% shares…. What? Precisely. It competes terribly unfairly with ‘really’ private companies, participates in the job carousel and is a company that is generally not well rated.
Or Stedin, where municipalities (and nowadays also partly the state) are the shareholders. Such a strange construction too. Now they were barely in ‘the picture’ until the discussion arose about the energy grid. Now it appears that all profits have been going to the municipalities for years instead of looking ahead and investing heavily in a solid, future-proof infrastructure. Consequence? National tax money in the hundreds of millions goes to this company that has previously made a very small number of municipalities rich.
The solution? I don’t have it.
I am a great supporter of vital infrastructure in government hands, but I also foresee major issues with this. The biggest of which is perhaps the political wind that blows from left to right as money is needed in other places.
(Comment edited by Triblade_8472 on October 12, 2023 8:51 AM)