alt Hacker News> where public funding programs for research has begun to be funneled to startups instead of research groups.
It is darkly amusing that in one post you claim "the left has not been popular since the 70s" whilst admitting that the EU is centrally planning new companies. That's very much the sort of thing the left did in the 1970s.
> You cannot seriously suggest that the EU has moved left in any meaningful way ... the EU commission is currently trying to implement that every new regulation can only pass once an old regulation can be removed.
And who believes they'll really do it? They only got to that point after ignoring decades of warnings from the right that their left wing approach would crush their own economic power, which it did.
It's a common enough claim that "the left" refers to exactly the same set of ideas that it did in 1930, and therefore that no modern entity is left wing. But this is spurious. There are still left wing people and groups, that claim to be so and nobody disagrees with them.
All that happened is that as left wing economics became discredited over the course of the 20th century the left became better at obfuscating what they were doing. After the working classes disappointed by not rising up in revolution, the concept of equality shifted to be about gender and race instead. The EU doesn't want to openly nationalize industries, but is really keen on feminism, regulation and mass third world migration.
And economically, the left didn't need to obfuscate much. The gap between heavy regulation and nationalization is small. CEOs get to pretend that they're still in charge, but with no strong commitment to private property rights they're ultimately just transient administrators and there's not much reason to sign up for the stresses of being one. So - no startups.
Centrally planning? My guy, the EU is not founding companies, it is giving existing companies subsidies. The profits of those companies will not be public, they are private.
Nationalization and regularization are both on the decline. The opposite has happened: privatization of state monopolies and deregulatization.
I also think it's hilarious that you think a) the EU is feminist, and b) that feminism is leftist. What you are describing is liberalism, a right wing political position.
And even the liberal right is losing ground to the conservative right. The EU commission is far more conservative than it ever has been, and hard-right parties are in government in at least six EU countries (see e.g., https://www.politico.eu/article/mapped-europe-far-right-gove...), with conservative governments elsewhere. This is a strict break with tradition, where the extreme right has been excluded from European governments by consensus of other parties ever since the second world war.
Your beliefs are not aligned with reality. I am also personally in the middle of this research money refunnelling, I can vouch forst hand that research money is being funneled to startups and other private companies, while austerity measures are hitting hard across the EU.