Comment by lm28469

1 day ago

It depends who's in charge of the nation though, you can have people planning for the long term well being of their population, or people planning for the next election cycle and making sure they amass as much power and money in the meantime.

That's the difference between planning nuclear reactors that will be built after your term, and used after your death, vs selling your national industries to foreigners, your ports to china, &c. to make a quick buck and insure a comfy retirement plan for you and your family.

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lm28469

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andsoitis  1 day ago

> That's the difference between planning nuclear reactors that will be built after your term, and used after your death, vs selling your national industries to foreigners

Are you saying that in western liberal democracies politicians have been selling “national industries to foreigners”? What does that mean?

  • pjc50  1 day ago

    That's a fairly literal description of how privatization worked, yes. That's why British Steel is owned by Tata and the remains of British Leyland ended up with BMW. British nuclear reactors are operated by Electricite de France, and some of the trains are run by Dutch and German operators.

    It sounds bad, but you can also not-misleadingly say "we took industries that were costing the taxpayer money and sold them for hard currency and foreign investment". The problem is the ongoing subsidy.

    • andsoitis  1 day ago

      > That's why British Steel is owned by Tata

      British Steel is legally owned by Jingye, but the UK government has taken operational control in 2025.

      > the remains of British Leyland ended up with BMW

      The whole of BL represented less than 40% of the UK car market, at the height of BL. So the portion that was sold to BMW represents a much smaller amount smaller share of the UK car market. I would not consider that “the UK politicians selling an industry to foreigners”.

      At the risk of changing topics/moving goalposts, I don’t know that your examples of European govts or companies owning or operating businesses or large parts of an industry in another European country is in thr spirit of the European Union. Isn’t the whole idea to break down barriers where the collective population of Europe benefit?

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