Treason Season??

[Dartz]

The whole point of getting into government is to be the one who governs - not to govern correctly. All politics is like that - it doesn't matter what you believe, they all want to wear that face-stamping boot. Idealists are all eventually subsumed by those who wear the boot and the boot always wins.

But that's another aregument. I'd argue otherwise that the socialist agenda' has - for the most part, been remarkably succesful where it's been employed in Europe.

We have problems in Ireland - most of them related to a government that absolutely refuses to fund anything. They refuse to pay the frontline soldiers, nurses and doctors that keep the system running in spite of itself - and then gloat about how much money they're in the black by this year. That seems somewhat reprehinsible - almost like they're deliberately trying to crash the systems of the state and those it depends on.

I still prefer our HSE to the US equivelant. I've had relatives lives saved by the evils of socialist medicine. Enough said. If you are fucked with something weird and unusual - the public system is far more effective than private. Private care here is normally used for electives, or quality of life items that could have long waiting lists in the public system. Eventually the government needs to go but while it's there it still needs to be governed itself.

In my experience - few if any public services have benefited from privatisation. Even something as simple as bin collections - once a private operator took it over from the council the price doubled, and it went from a collection at a very regular time to one that could happen any time during the day. People here are dreading the water services being privatised - which is why they object to charges on it so vehemently.

Our entire power grid was a socialist endeavour - this state in 1923 was brand new and large parts of the country were completely non-industrialised. The entire power grid was build by a state owned company funded initiall from taxation. It was a third of the State's annual budget at the time - and they built the largest industrial project of its type in the world at the time. The State paid private companies to build it - but it was always a State owned and run asset. The social benefits were massive - it completely changed the social fabric of Ireland. People could buy modern electrical appliances from shops owned by the State - they could be put on layaway onto your electric bill if you couldn't afford the full price now. It was almost Soviet Union level shit and it worked for decades until the early 2000's when it didn't need to anymore. For a long time, there was no market here worth setting up in for a private operator so the State had to provide.

In many ways it still is - the State still owns all of the electric infrastructure in Ireland. The State still operates it. And while there is a power market for generation - you can finance a generate, build it, and buy and sell power as you like, it's a very carefully run market and the majority of generation infrastructure - the tactical strategic shit to keep anyone from Enronning the fuck out of the market is still State owned.