[lbo-talk] Origin of "privatization"

[c b]

Why am I not surprised:
"How did we get here? In 1981, with inflation and unemployment at 10
per cent plus, with the recently elected Conservative government
forced to yield to the demands of the miners, public spending cuts
provoking general outrage and Thatcher’s prime ministerial career
seemingly doomed to a swift, ignominious end, a 38-year-old economist
from Birmingham University called Stephen Littlechild was working on
ways to realise an esoteric idea that had been much discussed in
radical Tory circles: privatisation. Privatisation was not a Thatcher
patent. The Spanish economist Germà Bel traces the origins of the word
to the German word Reprivatisierung , first used in English in 1936 by
the Berlin correspondent of the Economist , writing about Nazi
economic policy. In 1943, in an analysis of Hitler’s programme in the
Quarterly Journal of Economics , the word ‘privatisation’ entered the
academic literature for the first time. The author, Sidney Merlin,
wrote that the Nazi Party ‘facilitates the accumulation of private
fortunes and industrial empires by its foremost members and
collaborators through “privatisation” and other measures, thereby
intensifying centralisation of economic affairs and government in an
increasingly narrow group that may for all practical purposes be
termed the national socialist elite’."

from

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n17/james-meek/how-we-happened-to-sell-off-our-electricity

Joanna

^^^^^^^
CB: Wow, nice find !