The privatization trap
From schools to prisons, outsourcing government’s works typically ends with cronyism, waste and unaccountability
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/05/the_privatization_trap/singleton/
Once again I have had to resist the urge to copy the post in its entirety and embedding it here. I strongly urge my readers to check out the full article. I believe in the underlying concept of efficient government, but the way we are doing privatization is nothing like what I have in mind (I will try to discuss my thoughts on this subject at some point), we are just melding the absolute worse from a corrupt government and crony capitalism.
Privatization is one of the few political projects that enjoys bipartisan support: Conservatives cheer the rollback of the state, and liberals like to claim that the virtues of the free market are being used towards the egalitarian ends of public policy. The fraud and waste that often come with outsourcing these services has been well-documented. The private management in Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the lobbying efforts of corporate prisons have all provided horror stories of what happens when cronyism guides decision-making on behalf of the state. But privatization as standard government practice has problems that go far beyond the abuses of any single incident.
Rather than solving problems with government, privatization often amplifies those issues to new extremes. Instead of unleashing market innovation, it often introduces new parasitic partners into the decision-making process. Instead of providing a check on the power of the government, it allows the state to circumvent constitutional and democratic accountability measures by merging with the private sector. And ultimately, the practice replaces the set of choices and constraints found in democracy, with another set found in the marketplace. Today’s political conversation is blind to these problems out of a mistaken faith in the efficiency and fundamental equality of markets, contrasted to the ineffectiveness and corruptibility of the state.
What advocates miss is that the logic of markets creates private-sector coalitions capable of extracting just as much from taxpayers as the state. Corporations, lobbyists and other market actors can have just as much political agency as the government, and privatization can mobilize businesses to rewrite market practices.
The real solution, in my mind, is much like what is stated below…
We need new arguments for the government, with all its strengths and weaknesses, to be allowed to do its jobs knowing that it won’t always be perfect. The alternative is government by cronyism, delegated marketplace winners exploiting what works about markets with none of the normal checks we expect on a functioning democracy. There are no doubt weaknesses in the current functions of government, but for those who resist privatization, that is a call to political reform rather than one of abandoning the public arena altogether.
We, as a democratic nation (gee, did I just type that? what about the oligarchy? but hey, this blog does discuss lots of fantastic notions and a man can dream, can’t he?), need to accept the impossibility of perfection in our government and have clear, transparent and open conversations about which places we can tolerate higher levels of incompetence and those where we can’t and design accordingly. There probably is no ‘good’ for of government (to paraphrase Sir Winston, “democracy sucks, it is just better than any alternative”), there is probably only ‘good enough for the majority without being evil on the minority’.
