Post by Souriquois on Sept 12, 2018 8:23:47 GMT -4
How does the average Swede feel about privatization, though? Are they more open to it? It's very unpopular here in Canada, even among very conservative people, when Air Canada was, folks were like "OMG, airplanes are gonna drop out of the sky!" lol.
What about things like rail and stuff like that? That was met with resistance here. Like I said, people believed airplanes would drop out of the sky and that the trains would stop running if that was all privatized.
I think any politician would get shot if they privatized health care or schools.
Of course, Canadians are resistant to privatization even if it is a good idea. The reason Trump has been attacking us lately is because he wants us to privatize our dairy sector, and I largely agree with Trump here. We have a dairy cartel in this country and it’s ridiculous. It is a drain on the government, who is in turn offloading the costs on the consumers, so instead of making dairy cheaper (which was the purpose of it in the first place), it’s making dairy more expensive, like a carton of milk costs $6. If it was privatized, the cost of dairy would drop dramatically. But since Trump made it an issue, and Trump being Trump, was insulting about it, it will never happen now. I won’t even state my opinion on the matter in public, I might get shot lol.
Since Canada’s inflation rate is currently 3% (bad but not too bad), dropping dairy supply management will probably do the trick, but it’s politically very unpopular (mainly due to Trump, nobody even thought of where their milk came from before, so it could have been privatized and nobody would have noticed). Although maybe once national legal recreational marijuana sales go online next month, that will bring inflation down, since the weed stores will be run by the government and it’s expected to bring in $8 billion dollars annually, which will all go to the government. The plan for that is to put the money into health care (particularly mental health), schools, and affordable housing.
Of course, there is also a (temporary) problem with making things that were private public again. We have had shortages of life-saving prescription drugs in this country since the government took over the supplying of pharmacies (this was always done privately here). We have had a shortage of Epi-Pen all summer, and now a shortage of antidepressants. This has been hard for people in the short term (very... my cousin is allergic to bees), but I think good in the long term, but try convincing people of that. The price of a medication I am on dropped dramatically, from over $100 to $15 for a 3 month supply, and my mother’s insulin is free now. So yes, right-wingers who rail against public options are right in some regard, but they don’t realize it’s only temporarily disruptive (as long as it is done well, of course). The government buying up an oil company and pipeline infrastructure has been unpopular as well (but more with people on the left *shrugs*), but I hope it can help get people in the oil patch back to work. Although government owning oil infrastructure is what got Venezuela in the mess it is in now, but their biggest mistake is that their economy is too dependent on oil and never diversified, it’s not the socialism like claimed, there are also capitalist countries that have similar problems. Bolivia is under socialist leadership and doing well, but it is because their economy is quite diverse (and their leaders being much smarter than the leaders of Venezuela also helps).
At the end of the day, I think people don’t like changing the status quo, hence why Canadians were resistant to making some things public while resistant to privatizing some things at the same time. Prescription drugs, that should be public, and dairy should go private, but most people are ass backwards about it lol. I laugh at the fearmongering that is the dairy sector was privatized, American milk with bovine growth hormone will be in our stores... no, I will have to put my right-wing cap on here, the market would sort that out. If Canadians want their milk hormone free, then dairy producers will not use it, because they want to sell their products, and will meet customer demands to do so. Not to mention, since bovine growth hormone is illegal, they won’t have the option to use it if they want to sell in our market anyway... most likely, American producers won’t even bother because we have 1/10 the population of the US, so it wouldn’t really be worth the effort or expense for them to buy new cattle and separate facilities just to sell here (so it won’t put Canadian dairy farmers out of work, another fear)... it’s just the dairy cartel wants to make as much money as possible so they use the government to price gouge. They have a lot of lobbying power (and maybe if they didn’t spend so much money on lobbying and propaganda, they could drop the price of milk). Privatizing dairy would also mean we would get superior European cheese here, which is what we all buy and pig out on when we go to Europe lol.