[swooni]

Sweden's state-owned enterprises were sold purely because of politics. No one reversed course. It's just the right wing got majority and sold what they could when they had the chance including a large amount of public housing, schools and healthcare facilities.

[rayiner]

No, it wasn’t some accident of Swedish politics. The same thing happened all over the world at the same time. It happened in India, it happened in China. It happened in Germany. The movement toward state owned enterprises in the 1960s and 1970s was reversed in myriad countries with myriad political systems because it didn’t work.

[swooni]

I didn't say anything about the rest of the world. You made a statement about Sweden, even highlighting that it was "every single country" which, unless you want to qualify that statement, simply wasn't accurate. State-owned enterprises in Sweden weren't sold off because they didn't provide service or even didn't make profits but because of shifting politics in Sweden and the EU. Politicians who never wanted state-owned enterprises came into power and the EU made many ventures outright illegal as unlawful state aid. The same politicians who privatized everything else and ended conscription so Sweden had no choice but to join Nato. You can of course argue that "it didn't work because it wasn't wanted" but then the same thing goes for anything else that was changed like government owned nuclear power plants. Which these days of course also requires approval from the EU.

[xyzzyz]

> Politicians who never wanted state-owned enterprises came into power

And pray tell, how did that happen? How do people come into power in Sweden? I thought that it has a system where people propose what they will do, and the population votes on whose ideas and proposals they like the most, doesn't it?

[rayiner]

What happened in other countries is relevant because it shows that it wasn’t just something you can explain away as specific to Swedish politics and who got elected when.