Correct, this is kinda what I meant in that energy providers are private entities, but can’t really compete over price so the value of having a market based system is diminished

Yeah, this is what I meant by informed consumer, In thory if the consumers are okay with palm oil chocolate so long as it’s cheaper then that’s what the market will provide. If they don’t like it then it won’t sell.

But if they don’t know the difference they will go for the cheaper one then conclude they don’t like chocolate as much as they used to and buy less so both the customer and the brands providing real chocolate lose out.

The more insidious version of this are additives which actually taste better but with less obvious long term health detriments, e.g. packing everything with sugar and salt.

Nutrition labelling helps ofc, but even then who has the time to check the stats of every product they buy?

So my understanding is that they are the second strongest, but still at around 20% the other German parties formed a coalition that froze Afd out of power. So they are still a threat in future elections, but they have limited impact on policy for now.

Is that correct or have I got the wrong idea?

To play devil’s advocate;

The theory is that privately run enterprise is more efficient and is able to provide goods and services at lower price, the mechanism for this that most people don’t mention is that if there are many companies in competition the inefficient ones are out-competed and go bust.

The issue with privatisation is that this efficiency requires A: several businesses competing to provide the service, B: an elastic demand curve and C: informed consumers.

Ideally providing excellent service at a good price increases market share and poor service at high prices results in decreased market share.

The problem with privatisation is that most of the privatised services were nationalised originally because they are not a good fit for one of the above reasons.

E.g. medicine is difficult because if you break a leg you aren’t shopping around for hospitals you go to the nearest one, you can’t really just put it off and medicine is incredibly complex so being and informed consumer is difficult and the country needs sufficient coverage so hospitals going bust is unacceptable.

The UK has chronic issues with energy prices (I seem to remember seeing the highest in Europe?), but we don’t see energy companies undercutting one another, so it’s hard to argue that they are actually in competition.

The issue is that most privatised services wind up running as a defacto monopoly the same as the nationalised one, just as you mentioned now with a profit motive too which incentivises hollowing out the service via cost cutting.

“Big government” means thinking the government is bigger and more expensive than it needs to be.

When all the government needs to do is keep me happy then any program which I understand benefits me is vital and any which doesn’t is “big government”

The Hamas and IDF aligned telegram channels have both been remarkably consistent about cheering when about our munitions landing in their territory and decrying the reverse.

The threat of international condemnation and the less hawkish members of the Israeli government and electorate.

Predictably the rate at which civilians in Gaza are bombed by Israel went up not down after Hamas’ acts of terrorism the other week.

Even if you believe that the Israeli government is ontologically evil; serving them up causus belli to bomb and potentially invade Palestinian lands does not constitute “preventing Palestinians from being exterminated”, rather it actively helps them hastens the process