Slovenia is unattractive to foreign investors. Some say it is because we are a small Central European country. But anyone who visits the capitals of other Central European post-communist countries will see that there are skyscrapers of foreign multi-corporations there, and when they go to look at the data, they will also see that these countries have not only caught up with us but have already overtaken us in terms of GDP as measured by PPP (which measures purchasing power parity).
On the social network X, a paragraph has recently made rounds, showing how unattractive Slovenia is for foreign investment. In the first quarter of the year, when the potential of Golob’s National Socialist policy of protecting domestic fiefdoms and discouraging foreign investors was realised, a paltry 1.5 million euros of capital was invested in Slovenia, compared to 123 million euros in Croatia and 445 million euros in the Czech Republic.
Only 79 cents of foreign investment per Slovenian
The excuse is not Slovenia’s small size. Even if we count investments per capita, the figures are daunting. The average Czech receives 42.41 euros in foreign investment, according to a calculation by a user of the social network X. The average Croatian receives 31.69 euros in investment, while the average Slovenian receives only 79 cents. Some will applaud this, saying, we don’t want foreign, we won’t give up our own, but in reality, this is a national tragedy.
The world is a global village in which we all participate. Even the Americans and Chinese are not self-sufficient, let alone Slovenians. The Russians, too, are painfully aware of this fact, running out of German CMC machines for the production of military vehicles and Italian specialised lathes for the production of wheel structures for trains.
Without foreign capital, the Slovenian consumer will be completely subject to the domestic national-interest mafia. Do you remember how much you had to pay Telekom Slovenije for an ISDN + ADSL connection two decades ago? Much more than in foreign countries, and Telekom Slovenije cheated its users by saying that they needed ISDN if they wanted ADSL, even though this was not technically necessary, only to be charged for an outdated ISDN connection on top of that. Why was it possible for Telekom to allow this to happen? Because it was a monopolist, and the consumer had nowhere to go. This is the situation that Slovenian nationalists want for all industries.
The final victory of the Kučanist “our-ism”
These are post-communist countries comparable to ours. These countries are also, to some extent, economically interventionist and protectionist towards domestic industry, but not in such an extreme way as Slovenia, where the Golob government brought the final victory of the option that destroyed the Union Brewery and then sold it on, neutered, to Heineken (only after it had been completely looted by the Slovenian national socialists).
Entrepreneurs are also to blame
Left-wing politics is to blame, the media that are completely tied to it in terms of business, as well as ideology, are also to blame, but a large part of the blame must also be attributed to Slovenian feudal entrepreneurship – remember that there are a whole bunch of Slovenian entrepreneurs who cheer for the Left party (Levica) in Slovenia, which would abolish private property, while abroad, they are happily doing business under capitalism. Such is the case of Marin Medak, a regular participant in Friday’s political bike protests, who cheers for socialist egalitarianism while his company is based in neoliberal Estonia, or Žiga Vrtačič, who likes to promote radical socialism at home while preferring to run his business in the USA.
This is a particular new form of entrepreneurship, which some call Della Spina entrepreneurship (after Marin Medak‘s company), in which entrepreneurs would promote egalitarianism at home while enriching themselves in the neoliberal West. This kind of entrepreneurship is also to blame for where we are. It is the most hypocritical form of entrepreneurship, in which individuals want capitalist wealth for themselves and hard socialism for their fellow citizens. So, they want social relations to be like they were in the ‘old world’ – a world where there was no middle class, but only the privileged Della Spina and the extremely poor.
I. K.
