That be the same nation that just nationalised all those banks ?
Nationalisation is not a policy limited to socialists, as any dictator would tell you.
Er - I don't think that any dictator will actually
tell you this, but that does not, of course, make it any the less true!
Nationalisation seems to me to be a policy limited to governments that are either unable or unwilling (or both) to embrace or continue to permit a more effective solution so, by definition, it is indeed not limited to socialist governments. If banks and other corporations are subject to the law, it seems pointless to me to nationalise them purely just so as to ensure greater governmental control over their activities - i.e. for the purpose of minimising legal breaches (assuming that the government of the day would not itself break laws in its operation of firms that it had nationalised). From a purely commercial standpoint, it seems to me that the effectiveness, turnover and profitability of a company (and the relationship between the later two of those three things) is largely down to the success or otherwise of its management structure and operation and the wisdom or otherwise of its decision making and that, in principle, at least, it may not matter all that much who actually "owns" the company, as it's who runs it - and how - that counts most.
Where I worry most about corporations taken into what Viscount Stansgate (and others, of course) calls "public ownership" is that they effectively belong thereafter to the taxpayer until and unless they revert to private ownership at a later date (which is, I imagine, what may well turn out to be the fate of the recently nationalised British banks); when vast corporations are taken into public ownership during the opening stages of a severe economic recession, the often long-suffering and already overstretched taxpayer is least able to afford to buy shares in them by government decree and the government is, in turn, less and less able to fund those shareholdings because increasing numbers of taxpayers are accepting lower salaries, redundancy or loss of jobs and small businesses are going to the wall, with the inevitable consequence of sharply reduced tax revenues. It should not be forgotten that the government has no money of its own - only that which it is able to extract, by law, from the taxpayer. My concern is therefore not only for the taxpayer but for the extent to which such government takeovers might remain realistic; governments are no different to the rest of us in that they cannot fund purchases without the monies necessary to make them - or at the very least the access (via those dreaded things called loans) to such capital sums.
That said, I am not a professional economist so I accept that there may be valid reasons for governments to nationalise and de-nationalise certain organisations at certain times for reasons of economic expediency (such as, for example, the recent one with the UK banks). Given that certain high Tory politicians have on occasion condoned certain such nationalisation moves, it certainly seems to be true that nationalisation decisions are by no means necessarily synonymous with socialist policy.
