[jaccola]

> there is a regulator and there are price controls

> Free-market fundamentalists have flogged assets for years

Maybe the problem isn't the free market (since one does not in any way exist in this case) but government interventionism.

[psd1]

There are a few services best left in the public sector - e.g. defence, water, mail delivery.

When one government, for its own reasons, sells a service, intervention is required to return it to public hands. The cost of that intervention was created by the government that sold the service.

The intervention could be more or less problematic, but it isn't the problem.