Wednesday 18 July 2007

Metronet: A Private Company Operating Under A State Mandate.

I touched on this company in my article on monopolies over at LibertarianUK some weeks ago.

Metronet is/was NOT a proper private company at all. It was a consortium, nay, cartel inside an umbrella corporation, a private company operating with a State mandate. A monopoly of the worst kind.

The cartel behind it should pay back what is owed. It is a disgrace that the cartel members were able to suck so much money out of the organisation via the "contracts" they gave themselves.

6 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

"It is a disgrace that ..."

... whoever negotiated the contract on behalf of the taxpayer did not extract parent company guarantees.

That'd be New Labour then.

Roger Thornhill said...

...and Livingstone is grinning like a Cheshire Cat, seeing as he wanted nothing of it and was forced by Brown to take it on so the national debt would not be exposed and so upset his golden rule.

CFD Ed said...

Good comments Re Metronet.

On a different subject.

I have been taking some stick from and lots of web traffic ;-) from ‘Bad Science’ over this post.

They seem to be completely misinterpreting it. I am now wondering if that is their slant, or my poor writing.

I would appreciate it if you could do me a favour and give it a look, before looking at the comments, to see what you take the main point to be please. Is it me or is it them?

Mark Wadsworth said...

I think this is your killer paragraph

"If the previously existing single dose vaccine had been allowed to remain available as an alternative to MMR whilst they argued the toss, then any parents who had worries about the MMR vaccine could have used the old one, thus maintaining a general immunity in the population and a declining, or flat graph of incidents of measles".

True. Fact. Incontrovertible. My kids had the MMR jab back then, but I did have some misgivings.

But your problem is, you have got various self-interested parties, all covering their own arses and changing their story: Dr Wakefield, the GMC, the BBC, the NHS and the government, all of whom may well be lying through their back teeth.

Maybe even one of them is totally honest, but if you had to guess which, then who is most credible in all this?

Roger Thornhill said...

phil A, your post seems a very rational review and commentary on what happened. No swearbloggery or carpet-chewing mal de Mail.

At the core of this is the issue of the State monopoly on healthcare, i.e. control over our lives and, with the donor move, our death.

CFD Ed said...

Thanks guys.

I was starting to wonder if I was not being clear, but I now suspect someone from bad science got to it on a search, looking for stuff on Dr Wakefield. didn’t read it properly, jumped to conclusions and posted a link to it as supporting Wakefield.

Other visitors following the link would also have been primed to find what they were expecting…

An exercise in psychology if ever there was one. Could be a paper in it…