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A comment on Why privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain. Parent comment

Re:Why privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain by KaiserPro on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @06:25AM (#36678940)
Which was private under railtrack, but after a number of high profile crashes and failures was taken into public ownership again.

Railtrack made a lot of money by selling off land, and other assets, under invested and generally underperformed

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Re:Why privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain by tsukikage on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @09:53AM (#36680997)
Not disagreeing, but words are important here to get at precisely what happened.

> Railtrack made a lot of money

"Made" implies creation, growth, increase.

This is the opposite of what happened.

The money wasn't made. It was /extracted/. They /extracted/ a lot of money.

Railtrack doesn't have that money. Their succeeding entity doesn't have that money. The government doesn't have that money. The taxpayer doesn't have that money. None of that money was invested such that any of these entities might benefit from it in any way. It was removed from the system into private wallets.

The private owners plundered and fled, and the remaining skeleton was socialised again so it might regrow a bit of flesh from public taxes for the next extraction cycle.

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