Privatization or Law of the Jungle
Privatization; The Law of the Jungle
Editorial by Doug Holdread
January 27, 2005
From State Houses to the hallowed halls of Washington, privatization is in fashion. Private prisons are a lucrative growth industry. Vouchers open the way for private schools which are supposed to introduce a healthy competitive dynamic into education. And the writing is on the wall at the little community college where I work that the State will be weaning us from its financial support. Even aspects of the U.S. military are being privatized. Halliburton has an exclusive, no-bid, “private” contract to do all of the stuff that used to be part of military logistics. And now George Bush is trying to sell us on the idea of privatizing Social Security.
“Privatization” is an interesting word. It’s kind of similar to the word, “secret.” If something is private, it’s not public. It’s nobody's business but the parties involved. One of the problems with the "public sector" is that the public has the notion that there should be "public scutiny" of what the government is doing with our money and in our name. Of course the Pentagon has had its "black budget" for a long time, and now in the name of "national security" all sorts of governmental functions have been edged out of the sunshine and into the shadows. One nice shady place is "the private sector."
We all love our privacy. Big corporations probably love it most of all. And our government is discovering that by crawling in with corporate bed-fellows it is able to pull the sheets of privacy up snuggly under its chin.
Elected officials are just as lazy as anyone else. Anything that they can privatize is one less thing that they are responsible for. It becomes the private corrections corporation's responsibility if they pay low wages to their guards or fail to prevent a riot. It becomes the private school’s responsibility to worry about test scores. College’s alumni associations, rather than State legislators have to worry about raising funds to support higer education. And it’s Halliburton that has to answer for wasteful military spending. There were even private security contractors helping with the interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Perhaps if that job had been more completely contracted out, Rumsfeld and his underlings could have avoided the prisoner abuse accusations. It might have been the "Acme Security Corporation abuse scandal" instead.
But this trend toward privatization is bad for society. The whole idea of government is that we share certain social responsibilities together. Privatization really boils down to the eclipse of government by Capitalist economics. It's based upon “survival of the fittest” rather than the “common good.” It assumes a “me vs. them”, rather than an “us” social dynamic. “We” no longer have to worry about the rehabilitation of “our” lawbreakers; “they” will take care of "them." “We” are relieved of the burden of providing a quality education for all of "our" children. “They” have “school choice” and can figure it out for themselves. “We” are not responsible for wasteful military spending; we’ve contracted with Halliburton and “they” should be more efficient and ethical.
If Bush has his way, “we” will soon be relieved of worrying about the health and security of our elderly. “They” will be entrusting their privatized social security accounts to Wall Street, and if the corporations don’t do well with the money, that's just too bad for “them.”
The law of the jungle is "every creature for itself." But the tradition of civilized societies is that we share certain burdens, like reigning in and rehabilitating the lawless among us, educating our young, rich and poor and caring for our elderly. These should not be “private” matters.
