SkipCaptcha
67
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 31:
Line 31: + + + +
→Recent progress: Proof positive
In the out-turn Thursday ''was'' better, just not in the way I expected. My ''old'' craptop crashed once too often so I finally got round to fixing the boot problem on the ''new''(er) one. Betcha I spend Friday and half of Saturday frobbing, tuning, and tweaking the damned thing haha. [[Equity]]'s just gonna have to wait its turn. -J [[User:Psircleback|Psircleback]] ([[User talk:Psircleback|talk]]) 11:38, July 29, 2021 (EDT)
In the out-turn Thursday ''was'' better, just not in the way I expected. My ''old'' craptop crashed once too often so I finally got round to fixing the boot problem on the ''new''(er) one. Betcha I spend Friday and half of Saturday frobbing, tuning, and tweaking the damned thing haha. [[Equity]]'s just gonna have to wait its turn. -J [[User:Psircleback|Psircleback]] ([[User talk:Psircleback|talk]]) 11:38, July 29, 2021 (EDT)
Just to prove I haven't done nothing but play with a laptop for the last 48 hours... -J [[User:Psircleback|Psircleback]] ([[User talk:Psircleback|talk]]) 03:40, August 1, 2021 (EDT)
Measures to encourage employee share ownership however, thereby giving workers an incentive to take a broad view of their business's interests, have often been successful, sometimes very successful. The Americans having been insufficiently stupid ever to embark on a program of nationalization in the first place, history gave to the British the task of demonstrating why and how to reverse the process - although strictly they were anticipated on a small scale by the Canadians, who had vastly less industrial devastation to undo. Earlier attempts to 'denationalize' the so-called "commanding heights" of the British economy under the lackluster premiership of Edward Heath in the 1970s having come to nothing, it fell to middle-period Margaret Thatcher to champion the cause of 'popular capitalism' with an aggressive program of 'privatization' (although Thatcher herself disliked the word, at least initially; similarly, her longest-serving chancellor of the exchequer (=finance minister) Nigel Lawson's original coinage "people's capitalism" smacked, to her, far too much of "people's democracy," ie communist dictatorship, and was swiftly replaced).
The neologism 'Privatization', however, stuck - not least because no-one could come up with a superior alternative. But even if the word was ugly, the practice was usually a triumph and the overall results were quite remarkable: under Thatcher the proportion of British adults owning shares rose from one in fourteen to one in four. According to Lawson<ref>{{cite book|author=Nigel Lawson|title=The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical|year=1992|publisher=Bantam Press|isbn=978-0-593-02218-4|page=228}}</ref>, an "encouraging feature" of the Thatcher-era privatizations was that the proportion of the workforce subscribing for shares in the company many times exceeded ''ninety percent'' (which turned out to be the average; it reached 96% at British Telecom where only one in ''twenty-five'' employees did not invest), and this always despite trenchant union opposition to boot: "trade union leaders would condemn the privatization with bell, book, and candle, and enjoin their members not to touch it with a bargepole, and their members would take not the slightest notice of them." The unions found one or two unlikely allies among the old guard in the City of London (=financial district), with the head of one broking house exclaiming "But John [Moore, Lawson's Financial Secretary], we don't want all those kind of people owning shares, do we?"