Good find on the Teflon, I had heard that 'story' and never verified it.
Design is not always the problem. Some years ago, I was selling a lot of amber, and I was buying from a Russian dealer (he lived outside of Russia). He told us to avoid buying any jewelry made in Russia. The fact that folks could not be fired, meant that many of them did low quality work. They would not match stones on earrings for example.
How hard would you work, if you got paid even if your work was crappy? Some would, but many don't.
Now it seems you're switching horses mid-stream. First you asked, "
Can you give us 3 major products that came from a state owned industry?" When people offered numerous examples of major products (and good ones at that) that came from state-owned industries, you changed the criteria and said that the products had to be "developed by the government".
So when you offer the Yugo GV as an example of the failures of state-owned industry when it comes to automobile manufacture, I pointed out that that car was built on a Fiat design. Now design doesn't matter, it's all about the workers.
You keep moving the goalposts.
And you're also making
very sweeping generalisations about labour laws and workers' rights in socialist countries. Yugoslavia was not the same as the USSR and many mixed-market countries (not socialist, but places like Sweden and even the UK of the 1970s) had state-owned industries with expanded workers' rights but still turned out stellar products.
I know Mike C has joked about the reliability of his Triumph Stag - and I think by the 70s and 80s the British auto industry was certainly in a poor state. But there was once a time when British products were good - our railway still relies heavily on rolling stock built by British Rail, for example.
I'm not necessarily advocating for state-ownership of private enterprise (although I am an advocate of nationalisation of many things, such as the railway, for example). I am a socialist, but not that kind of socialist (that's a whole other discussion, but many on the left don't consider the USSR, etc to be socialist societies - we consider them to have been 'state capitalist' societies).
Anyway, some general points:
1) You keep moving the goalposts and redefining what you mean - whether by saying a product has to be developed by the state or then by discounting things like battle tanks. If you keep finding reasons to dismiss the examples given, then it is likely you will never be satisfied.
2) With the exception of the former Warsaw-pact nations, most state-owned industries operate in a mixed-market economy. And as such, they generally tend to be concentrated in certain sectors, such as infrastructure. You're not going to see exciting, flashy examples of things there. And today you're more likely to see public-private partnership (which half of the time is really just a way to loot the public coffers), where the state works in tandem with private capital (think SAS airlines in Scandinavia). Again, not too thrilling.
3) The industrial revolution was well up and running for a long time before there was anything close to a socialist government in power. However, it should be noted that nationalisation of industries or companies (for lack of a better word) has always taken place, even under non-socialist governments. But again, we're talking about the very non-glamorous things like canals and railways and coal or things like that. But the capitalist economies have had a very large head start - and they far outnumber the socialist ones (if there really are any). But in terms of the original question - the privately-owned companies far outnumber the state-owned companies and tend to be in very different fields. So it's not really a fair comparison.
4) Say what you will about the USSR, but their innovation, hard work and product development turned the tide against Nazi Germany. And maybe they never set the world alight with any of their consumer goods, but the AK-47 is an original design that is still with us, for better or for worse. And for the record, I think it's a real shame that we keep having to cite weapons as examples in this thread. And both the state and the private sector are to blame for that.
Just a few thoughts. I just realised this rambled on a lot longer than I intended. Sorry about that