I think everyone agrees — and yes, that’s saying a lot — that both the government and private sectors have a role to play. The balance varies by an extreme amount, but no one I know of thinks the government should play a 100% or 0% role in the economy. But some think it should be a lot closer to one or the other.
What I’m discussing here is an idea of the role the private sector should play.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the views are based on uninformed and even emotional ideology — most of all a repulsion to ‘big government’ without considering the actual facts.
I would suggest that the private sector has the stronger role to play when more entrepreneurial and customer satisfaction needs are involved.
The private sector should make most entertainment products, and consumer products. We don’t need the summer blockbuster, our automobiles, or videogames made by the government.
But much too often, industries are privatized for the wrong reasons — because there’s money to be made, not because it’s good for society.
Many things the government can do better — with democratic values, efficiently, are instead done by the private sector doing it worse in a lot of ways.
For example, prisons. For another, healthcare. For another, education.
There are right-wing fantasies of all these things being better when private. Why, the private sector will innovate all kinds of creative ideas, and find efficiencies — it’ll be better and cheaper!
Except it’s not. Instead, when driven by a profit motive, the tendency is to underdeliver to increase profits, and costs tend to increase.
So, for example, education was supposed to be revolutionized by the private sector, clearing out all that public waste and protection of labor.
Instead, on average as I understand, they do worse — with exceptions who do well (and are held up to sell the privatization).
Where they HAVE ‘innovated’ is how to only accept students without expensive special needs — dumping them on the public system, to increase their profits.
A lot of ‘centrist Democrats’ tend to buy into these fantasies and support these efforts — they’ll say they support them for the goals of better results, but are slow to recognize they aren’t better.
Right now we have an almost religious support for privatizing. What we need instead is a pretty rigorous standard for what should be privatized.
And that’s not only for the direst issues, of the services delivered and the costs.
It’s because there are additional costs, to having the great inequality that comes with excessive privatization — so that the concentrated wealth takes over our society’s politics as well.
And that puts it in direct conflict with democracy — and these trillions dollars have a very vested interest in keeping their businesses private for their own benefit at society’s cost.
And the government isn’t even bad at some of the private areas. PBS and NPR are fine in the marketplace and the BBC shows how a lot more is possible. When the government wanted great breakthroughs to create a nuclear bomb, to put a man on the moon, it did them well. It’s long funded basic research that has benefited the private sector and society. It made a little thing called the internet.
We need to greatly reduce the private sector, while protecting it where it’s justified.
The industries mentioned above — prisons, education, and more need to be made public — with some exceptions like some private schools, but without government incentives for them.
The private military industry makes good weapons (usually), but at great cost. Their budget dwarfs the rest of government agencies outside of spending directly on the public. How much of that is because they have the political power to protect their profits, rather than because that is how society benefits the most from that spending?
There are reasons for warnings about the ‘military-industrial complex’ and the industry spreading production to as many Congressional districts as possible in all 50 states.
The public sector has no ‘salesman’ -the private sector has entire ‘think tanks’ and a media structure to sell it, for the benefit of those who profit.
We need to do more under the democratic system — to promote the public good, for efficiencies, and to limit the great fortunes that push plutocracy on our society.
Doing this needs government and citizens to support the public sector. To honor and pay public workers.
And to give the right the issue on which they have a point on this — there can be corruption and waste in the public sector as well, and we need systems to fix that. There are cases of fiefdoms being created with unjustified salaries and waste and we need independent watchdogs investigating and protecting society’s interests. That issue justifies measures, not privatization, that’s where they get it wrong.
I’d like to see a certain amount of budgeting for promoting the public sector. This is dangerous because of how easily it can be abused to promote the politicians, but I think there’s a point to the government informing the people of what it’s doing, to have a counterpoint to the constant anti-government messages they’re bombarded with by the private sector and right-wing ideologues.
Why shouldn’t the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, issue and annual report to the American people saying what was done for them? How many Americans know?
And that’s why we have politicians winning votes by running on agendas to end agencies — such as Rick Perry trying to list three he’d remove, forgetting the one he now runs.