Labour Battalions were set up to absorb the unemployed and unemployable, factories to process capers and whatever "gulepp" is known as in a language that is spoken by more than a few thousand were sprinkled around the landscape and "import substitution" enterprises became the order of the day, if you were fondly looked upon.
This all brought the country to the point where you couldn't get a decent bar of chocolate without resorting to smuggling, where you couldn't watch colour telly unless you were a good friend of a good friend's friend and you couldn't find decent employees for love or money, because everyone got used to being owed a living by the State.
The current manifestation of the Labour Party has not followed in Mintoff's footsteps, or in Dr KMB's.
Or so they tell us.
You can buy pretty much anything you like and you can watch any programme you like in wide-screen UHD with curved screens and super-duper sound without needing to have a special relationship with the Minister's driver's third cousin twice removed.
But, hang on a tick, hold your horses, just a tiny cotton-picking minute, is Labour's business plan today all that different from the way they used to conduct the country's affairs back when Dom was boss?
Back then if, and only if, you were a Lejburist, you'd get to run the country's important bits, the nationalised banks, the utility corporations and the transport outfits, all of which were "the People's" and only the favoured few were allowed to ply their trade in the areas of commerce that were open to (relatively) free enterprise.
Today, the slogan is that you're allowed to disagree with us, but you can still work with us, but it's only a slogan, worth not even the paper the bill-board was covered with, along with that other one about it not being who you know but what you know that's important.
How else would you explain, Lord Luv Us, Minister Chris Cardona's "explanation" of the fact that his "Chief of Staff's" (in the bad old days, he would have been the Minister's driver, only a semantic distinction) barely adult, not to mention barely lucid, nephew has been placed in charge of a Government-owned company that appears to have been set up to do sweet nothing, with no employees and a business plan that seems to consist of warm effluence?
Why set up a company, with the faffing-about that has to accompany registering, auditing and generally administering it, if it's not going to have employees and not going to pay its director/judicial representative/company secretary, even were he worth being paid anything?
This is only symptomatic and it's a teeny tiny miniscule example, completely irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, of the way people like Chris Cardona and Premier Muscat's Bortherhhod do things.
There's so much more to consider, such as the Cafe Premier/Australia Hall/Gaffarena/€88,000,000 Guarantee/Zonqor/CHOGM/Garage Rehearsal Seekers/Land to Chinese For Free/Premier Car Leasing Dodge/Sai Mizzi Lang's Husband's Wife's Salary/€500,000 Cash Under the Bed/Cops for Rent/JPO/Lara Boffa/Franco Debono/Jobs For Nothing Scandal, to give it its full title.
"Vote Labour, get Labour" should have been the PN's slogan: now it can be used, with only a small change and addition, by the switchers, who can join hands and chant "We voted Labour, we got Labour, we are Unfit for Purpose, Shame on Us, Shame on Us" in a dirge-like fashion.