By: Nova24tv.si
Slovenia is unappealing to foreign investors. Some say it’s because we are a small Central European country. However, anyone who visits the capitals of Central European post-communist countries will see skyscrapers of foreign multinationals dominating the skyline. When they examine the data, they will also see that these same countries have not only caught up with us but have already surpassed us in GDP measured by PPP (purchasing power parity).
A graph circulating on the social network X highlights just how unattractive Slovenia is for foreign investments. In the first quarter of the year, during the implementation of Golob’s nationalist-socialist policies that protect domestic strongholds and deter foreign investors, only a meagre €1.5 million of capital was invested in Slovenia, compared to €123 million in Croatia and €445 million in the Czech Republic.
Only 79 cents of foreign investment per Slovenian
The small size of Slovenia is not an excuse. Even when investments are calculated per capita, the numbers are alarming. The average Czech receives €42.41 in foreign investments, the average Croatian €31.69, while the average Slovenian gets only 79 cents. Some might applaud this, saying, “We do not want foreign influence, and we will not give away our own resources,” but in reality, this is a national tragedy.
The world is a global village where everyone participates. Even Americans and Chinese are not self-sufficient, let alone Slovenians. This is a fact that the Russians are painfully discovering as they run out of German CMC machines for military vehicle production and Italian specialised lathes for manufacturing train wheel structures.
Without foreign capital, the Slovenian consumer will be entirely subject to the domestic national-interest mafia. Remember how much you paid Telecom Slovenia two decades ago for an ISDN + ADSL connection? Much more than in foreign countries, while TS tricked its users by saying that ISDN was necessary if they wanted ADSL, even though this was not technically required. They simply charged extra for the outdated ISDN connection. Why could Telekom get away with this? Because they were a monopolist, and consumers had no alternative. This is the kind of situation Slovenian nationalists desire for all industries.
The final victory of Kučan’s “our-ism”
These are post-communist countries comparable to ours. While these countries are somewhat economically interventionist and protectionist towards domestic industries, not to the extreme extent seen in Slovenia, where Golob’s government has marked the final victory of the faction that destroyed Union Brewery and then sold it castrated to Heineken (only after it had been thoroughly looted by Slovenian national socialists).
For foreigners, Slovenia is too expensive, overly bureaucratic, and foreign consultants familiar with our country quickly advise that nothing can be done here without involving politics, as the bureaucratic apparatus is completely aligned with the left-wing political conglomerate and the domestic economic mafia that controls politics.
Entrepreneurs are also to blame
Leftist politics are to blame, as are the business and ideologically aligned media, but a significant part of the blame also lies with Slovenian feudal entrepreneurship. Let’s not forget that several Slovenian entrepreneurs who support the Levica party, which advocates abolishing private property, are happily doing business abroad in capitalist environments. Take Marin Medak, a regular participant in Friday’s political cycling protests who advocates for socialist egalitarianism, while his company is headquartered in neoliberal Estonia, or Žiga Vrtačič, who promotes radical socialism at home but prefers to manage his business in the U.S.
This is a new form of entrepreneurship, sometimes called Della Spina entrepreneurship (after Marin Medak’s company), where entrepreneurs want egalitarianism at home while amassing wealth in the neoliberal West. Such entrepreneurship is also responsible for our current situation. It represents the most hypocritical form of entrepreneurship, where individuals seek capitalist wealth for themselves and hard socialism for their fellow citizens. In other words, they desire a societal structure like that of the “old world” – a world without a middle class, only privileged Della Spina types and the extremely poor.