The automobile industry in Iran is privately owned and managed.
I would recommend watching the outstanding documentary "Okhtapus", whose author conducted some fascinating in depth research into some of the corrupt practices by IKCO's shareholders, who are liberal-minded private investors rather than government officials:
Moreoever, the notion that a privatized automobile industry will experience greater levels of innovation and quality improvement thanks to free market competition is flawed. Simply because the automobile market is an oligopolistic one at the global scale: with increasing fusion and concentration of large carmaking companies, there are no more than a handful of these left.
Which in turn encourages them to come to tacit understandings as to how to share the market between them, instead of engaging in competition.
This is the case of all major industries and even service activities in the capitalist west nowadays. In other words, there is no real innovation-promoting competition between corporate oligopoles that attribute market shares to each other through backdoor deals.
https://topforeignstocks.com/2019/10/27/the-global-auto-industry-is-an-oligopoly/
http://docplayer.net/4353499-The-ev...a-few-and-subsequent-oligopoly-formation.html
Here's everything you need to know about why is the automobile industry is considered an oligopoly, and the current state of the industry.
suvcult.com
This is what unfettered capitalism leads to. Not to perfectly functional, self-regulating free markets, but to a negation of these principles. It truly is an inherently flawed, self-defeating system.
Government does not have to manage every single aspect of the economy to the slightest detail, however it should at all times intervene in four types of sectors and/or activities:
1) Regulation of financial markets and maintenance of national sovereignty in the monetary realm. In particular, a government-controlled Central Bank and state control over money printing.
Else, those in charge will constantly prescribe a restrictive monetary policy and structural adjustment for the benefit of large corporations, with pressure constantly mounting on the working masses and the poor, thus provoking regular increase in social-economic inequalities.
Something that would be particularly intolerable in an Islamic system, where social justice is a central theological tenet Muslims have a duty to enact. The 1979 Islamic Revolution was made in the name of the mostaz'afin, the downtrodden, and revolutionaries are not going to throw this Islamic principle overboard for some dangerously utopian concepts of bankster-led ultra-capitalism, which are failing right before our eyes in the west and its client states.
2) Industries, agricultural sectors and services where private actors will be disincentivized to invest into due either to a comparatively low return on investment, or to a protracted, slow paced return on investment.
3) Sectors of economic activity deemed crucial for national security. For example the food industry and key agricultural staple products such as wheat. Other example, the pharmaceutical industries.
4) Sectors considered important enough for governmental authorities to protect nascent national production against foreign competition that would otherwise nip it in a bud.
To break it down,
* Sectors where tight regulation and intervention by public authorities is required to guarantee supply and affordable price levels:
- Food industries and staple agricultural products.
- Pharmaceutical industries.
* Sectors that ought to remain public monopolies:
- Extraction and sale of oil and gas.
- Distribution of water, electricity and gas.
- Telecommunications fundamental infrastructure.
- Railway fundamental infrastructure, public urban transportation.
- Defence industries, space program, etc.
* Sectors where the state may share means of production with the private sector, but should own a good proportion of these:
- Strategic heavy industries.
- Strategic high-tech and knowkedge based industries.
- Power generation.
- Telecommunications.
- Healthcare, in particular hospitals (a strong network of public hospitals alongside private ones is a must).
- Construction (Khatam ol-Anbiya should continue being active alongside private companies).
- Airliners (national flagship airliner).
- Education (public schools and universities must be largely predominant in numbers).
- Production and supply of cultural goods and amenities (cultural centers, bookstores etc).
- Broadcast media (even if their monopoly status may be revised to some extent).
Everywhere else, free market norms may apply under the condition that fair and just labor laws guarantee the rights and dignity of workers and employees.
This is balanced enough. Problem we have though, is that Iranian liberals tend to be more Catholic than the Pope.
It's as if they were conceptually and factually stuck in 1991, still imagining like Francis Fukuyama back then, that the ideological and political history of man had come to a halt with the collapse of the USSR, thanks to which the western model of secular liberal "democracy" coupled with unchecked capitalism supposedly scored an eternally lasting victory, and would thus be left unchallenged for all time to come given it's inherent superiority, so they thought, over every other possibly conceivable type of system.
Of course these naive dogmatic beliefs have since been largely retracted or relativized, including by many of those who conceived them initially. But somehow, Iranian liberals missed the boat. They seem more indoctrinated than the "good old" Serbian Otpor students bankrolled and trained by Soros-owned foundations.
Somehow, the 2009 global financial crisis which ripped through the western-dominated capitalist world, the steady ascent of an authoritarian China along with the revival of an illiberal Russia as rival centers of power in a more and more multipolar world, as well as crumbling infrastructures and increasing social unrest in America served as wake-up calls to many, and yet Iranian liberals apparently prefer clinging to their western-centric outlook as if nothing happened. So they keep dwelling in their slumber... or perhaps it's just that they pretend to be asleep.
In my opinion, the great Iranian nation with its unparalleled history can do without a current of thought as civilizationally alienated as this. Iran has everything she needs to keep sustaining herself and improving the lives and spirituality of her people - from natural to human resources and an outstanding cultural and philosophical heritage. Why even look abroad for inspiration, and to the zionist-dominated western political and economic system of all places, knowing moreover that the regimes which designed this system are existential enemies to Iran?
