Privatization has been compared to selling your house to stay at a luxurious hotel for a year. That might not be a bad generalization, but more to the point in my localized experience every single public service that's been privatized or deregulated to any extent have shown a distinct lack of improvement. Prices go up, standards go down, workers get less training and less job security, advertising becomes more irritating, millions and millions are spent on making corporate logos more cool and happening. I'm not seeing a single damn example of anything that's gotten better by being privatized.

(Admittedly I haven't looked very hard.)

Those charts actually make me feel nauseous.

We should drop some socialist/communist hammers in this thread and see which pro-capitalists show up now.

I can't remember where I read it, but that top 1% isn't actually a whole percent apparently - it's closer to being something like just 400 people.

To be honest, Alko is more to control the sale of a substance that has potentially large effects on society as a whole. It's basically nanny state sort of stuff. But I consider it to be an essential service, and it is sort of great to be able to go to one single place for all of your alcohol needs. Don't even get me started on alcohol and its importance in Finnish student culture.

Me neither. But somehow these people always claim that privatization has been proven to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of services.

Hey, Smarty, I'm currently teaching Animal Farm, got anything to say to the kids? This is your chance to impress/scar them for life with something, so think up something good and post it here.

(Note: Already mentioned Trotsky was murdered with an ice axe, you have to think of something else).

As for the thread topic, I'd say the current attack on unions is only the first step in slowly regressing us back to the age of the robber barons, union busting, and wage slavery of the late 1800 to early 1900s. It's gonna be a ton of fun, let me tell ya.

The chart I thought was funniest was the distribution of wealth chart entitled "What Americans think it is". People in this country are just totally clueless about how just enormous the gigantic piles of the wealth are that is owned by an incredibly tiny, fractional amount of people.