Correct, this is kinda what I meant in that energy providers are private entities, but can’t really compete over price so the value of having a market based system is diminished

Yeah, this is what I meant by informed consumer, In thory if the consumers are okay with palm oil chocolate so long as it’s cheaper then that’s what the market will provide. If they don’t like it then it won’t sell.

But if they don’t know the difference they will go for the cheaper one then conclude they don’t like chocolate as much as they used to and buy less so both the customer and the brands providing real chocolate lose out.

The more insidious version of this are additives which actually taste better but with less obvious long term health detriments, e.g. packing everything with sugar and salt.

Nutrition labelling helps ofc, but even then who has the time to check the stats of every product they buy?

So my understanding is that they are the second strongest, but still at around 20% the other German parties formed a coalition that froze Afd out of power. So they are still a threat in future elections, but they have limited impact on policy for now.

Is that correct or have I got the wrong idea?

To play devil’s advocate;

The theory is that privately run enterprise is more efficient and is able to provide goods and services at lower price, the mechanism for this that most people don’t mention is that if there are many companies in competition the inefficient ones are out-competed and go bust.

The issue with privatisation is that this efficiency requires A: several businesses competing to provide the service, B: an elastic demand curve and C: informed consumers.

Ideally providing excellent service at a good price increases market share and poor service at high prices results in decreased market share.

The problem with privatisation is that most of the privatised services were nationalised originally because they are not a good fit for one of the above reasons.

E.g. medicine is difficult because if you break a leg you aren’t shopping around for hospitals you go to the nearest one, you can’t really just put it off and medicine is incredibly complex so being and informed consumer is difficult and the country needs sufficient coverage so hospitals going bust is unacceptable.

The UK has chronic issues with energy prices (I seem to remember seeing the highest in Europe?), but we don’t see energy companies undercutting one another, so it’s hard to argue that they are actually in competition.

The issue is that most privatised services wind up running as a defacto monopoly the same as the nationalised one, just as you mentioned now with a profit motive too which incentivises hollowing out the service via cost cutting.

The interesting thing about reading from different bubbles to get the different perspectives on the same event is just how different the set of events covered is.

The right may be furious about something and the left barely cover it and vice versa, it needs to be a huge event to attract comment from both sides.

“A Line in the Sand” by James Barr is a good book on the topic, it goes into how the rivalry between Britain and France wound up with them attempting to carvr up the middle east between them after the fall of the ottoman empire.

War and destabilisation of the Arabian population was the outcome, but I think it is highly reductive to say it was the intent, for one that would imply some level of cooperation beteen the colonial powers against the native populations when they regarded each other as bitter enemies and didn’t really regard the people of the middle east at all.

Every step taken by Britain and France was with the aim increase or secure their territory while undermining the other. A lot of these steps were training arming and funding of local military/gorillas/terrorists opposed to the other country, but usually these were inflaming and exploiting existing religious/ethnic/tribal tensions rather than manufacturing them from nothing or drafting into an officially military force, which has the unpleasant property that even after the colonial powers have departed, the trainings traditions and blood feuds continue.