Why was Japan’s world-class power system dismantled in the name of “liberalization”?
Deregulation has stripped jobs, weakened companies, and made public infrastructure fragile.
The lead-contaminated water crisis in Flint, Michigan brutally reveals where such policies lead.

There is absolutely no necessity to liberalize Japan’s electric power industry, which has continued to supply the highest-quality electricity in the world.
2016-01-24

The other day, I wrote that there is absolutely no need—and that it is entirely unnecessary—to liberalize Japan’s electric power system, which has long provided the highest-quality electricity in the world.
Proof of this fact appeared yesterday on page 7 of the Sankei Shimbun.

The so-called “liberalization of electricity” is nothing but a deception that once again allows only a handful of people, such as Masayoshi Son, to accumulate meaningless enormous wealth, while merely damaging Japan’s electric power companies, which can be said without exaggeration to be the world’s finest.

This is because Japan’s electric power companies are groups of enterprises that have employed a vast number of workers.
For example, Tokyo Electric Power Company has continued, on average, to employ about 40,000 workers since the end of the war.
If one includes employees of affiliated companies and related enterprises, the number becomes enormous.
The same is true of all other electric power companies.

In each region, they were also the companies that the most outstanding people sought to join.
That is precisely why they were also the world’s most outstanding companies.

I wrote that deregulation and regulatory opening did not contribute at all to solving Japan’s long-term deflation, which is now hated like a venomous thing by countries all over the world.
Instead, it merely widened disparities and further deepened deflation—and that the bus accident proved this.

[Followed by the Flint, Michigan lead-contamination report…]