On Fedi, Reverse wrote:
On the 6th of May, the Swedish Parliament decided to accept a new law that is supposed to “strengthen competition”, via harder punishments on public companies that compete “unhealthily” with private companies
This has been widely (and jubilantly) reported by various media operated by Svenskt Näringsliv, which is to be expected. With a quick search I didn’t find any leftist publications talking about this. Perhaps because it’s just a strengthening of an existing law from 2010 that (according to the lizardpeople from the article linked in this message), it proved toothless? So perhaps all the red ink has already been spilled back then about it?
In any case, trying to understand what it means made it seem disgusting in many parts. The classic example given in explanations of both the old and the new law is “what if the state or municipality decides to run a gym at undermarket prices” (I’m paraphrasing but that’s the gist of it).
Oh yes, what a tragedy indeed. The horror.
The project leader for the new rules at Konkurrensverket spells it out:
Offentliga aktörer kan ha fördelar som de privata företagen saknar som exempelvis att verksamheten kan drivas utan vinstkrav
What fucking lizardpeople this government is.
And yes, the law includes things that even I think are reasonable, like that public companies cannot restrict access to infrastructure that they alone can have, so that there can be private actors that offer better terms to the public.
But the most important part is that the law guarantees the opposite: that even the public sector has to offer services at terms that are at least as bad as the private sector.
The public sector is “inefficient” my ass.
Yeah, although I’m not even onboard with that part. I get that you wrote “reasonable”, not “fantastic”, and maybe that’s where I’d land too as in “contrary to the rest of this law which is tyrannical, suffocating, makes a mockery of freedom, and furthers corporate trampling of people power, this part at least makes sense, I ‘only’ disagree with it (reasoning that it’s great if public infrastructure primarily benefit public works, and that this paragraph whiffs of the ‘marknadshyror’ debacle and, like it, will lead to furthering the collapse of what we the people built together and have together), whereas the rest of the law is just complete and thorough cruelty without any amount of reason, motivation, or consistency with self-professed free-trade values, just a blatant money grab and a punch in the face of all of us” kind of “reasonable”.
Thanks for bringing attention to this. I hate it so much. And because of the ratchet effect and the de-leftification of the S party (although thankfully they did vote no on this one), I despair that this won’t be easily fixed or restored anytime soon.