Greek fire sale on infrastructure–a new experiment in privatization

Brilliant MPP student Teddy Minch sent me this link for what boils down to, in Teddy’s words, a Greek fire sale. On the auction block:

For the taking: four wide-body Airbus jets, a state lottery, a state horse-racing concession and sports book, stakes in a casino, several ports, a national post office, two water companies, a nickel miner and smelter, a munitions maker, electricity and gas monopolies, a telecommunications operator, shares in a half dozen banks, hundreds of miles of roads, a defunct airport, old Olympic venues and thousands of acres of land, including magnificent stretches of Greece’s famed coast.

Now it will be enlightening to see what happens here. I’m assuming the coastal areas are going to get bought up really fast–there are mega-bazillionaires who will want the coastal property for private playgrounds, and since the universe appears to have lost any sense that such natural blessings ought to be public goods, they’ll get them here.

Does anybody want to operate Greek telecommunications? Their electric company? Banks? Not me.

Anybody want to pool our money to buy some coastal property? Oh, and lets buy the airport near it and the roads serving it so we can completely control the space, and then we could swank around like John Forsythe as Blake Carrington, Capitalist.