The Five-Step Process to Privatize Everything
At the heart of privatization is a disdain for government and a love of mindless
individualism.
By Paul Buchheit
May 04, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - Law enforcement, education, health
care, water management, government itself -- all have been or are being
privatized. People with money get the best of each service.
At the heart of privatization is a disdain for government and a distrust of
society, and a mindless individualism that leaves little room for cooperation.
Adherents of privatization demand 'freedom' unless they need the government to
intervene on their behalf.
These privatizers have a system:
1. Convince Yourself that "I Did It On My Own"
The people in position to take from society seek to rationalize their actions,
and many have accomplished this through the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the author
of The Virtue of
Selfishness. She rejected community values, saying "Any group...is only a
number of individuals...If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of
altruism that men have to reject."
Post-Ayn-Rand, in the growing era of neoliberalism, with Ronald Reagan blurting
"government is the problem" and Margaret Thatcher proclaiming "There is no such
thing as society," once-respected institutions like public
education and public
transportation were demonized as "socialist" and "Soviet-style." The message
has been repeated so often by the business-backed media that the general public
began to believe it. Said The
Economist with regard to product development, "Governments have always been
lousy at picking winners, and they are likely to become more so, as legions of
entrepreneurs and tinkerers swap designs online, turn them into products at home
and market them globally from a garage. As the revolution rages, governments
should stick to the basics...Leave the rest to the revolutionaries."
But as Mariana Mazzucato points out in The
Entrepreneurial State, "In reality it is the State that has been engaged on
a massive scale in entrepreneurial risk taking to spur innovation." There is
much evidence for
this, in a multitude of disciplines, especially in technology and
pharmaceuticals, both of which have seen corporate research labs diminishing if
not entirely disappearing.
In the burgeoning new field of nanotechnology, says Mazzucato, industry cannot
justify applications that require 10 to 20 years of development and which demand
a coordination of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, engineering, and
computer science.
2. Insist that the Removal of Government Will Benefit All People
The removal of government is equated to a vague demand for "freedom" which is
hyperbolic if not meaningless. It gained momentum with Milton
Friedman, who said: "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a
lack of belief in freedom itself." The Cato
Institute went on to preach that "Free markets create a future promoting
integrity and trust." And Forbes Magazine founder Steve
Forbes blustered: "You can't create prosperity without freedom!"
Despite the fact that this 'freedom' has generated the greatest inequality in
nearly 100 years, apologists try to convince us that somehow we're all
prospering. From the Wall
Street Journal: The U.S. economy is on a tear. From a Moody's
analyst: Our economy is firing on most cylinders.
Some libertarian "lovers of freedom" go to even greater extremes to defend the benefits of
inequality for all of us, claiming that income inequality is Good
For The Poor, and even that "Income inequality in a capitalist system is truly
beautiful."
3. Ensure that Government Isn't Removed Until You Get Rich
As the well-to-do have complained about government, they've also made sure that
government has continued to help them, with a mind-boggling array of deductions,
exemptions, exclusions, and loopholes.
At least $2.2
trillion per year in tax expenditures, tax underpayments, tax havens, and
corporate nonpayment go mostly to the very rich, the most brazen of whom make
the astonishing claim that their hedge
fund income should be taxed at a much lower rate than a teacher's income.
Their tax breaks are augmented by the payroll
tax rate limit, which allows multi-millionaires to pay a tiny percentage
compared to middle-income earners; by high-risk derivatives that
are the first to be paid off in a bank collapse; and by a bankruptcy law
that allows businesses, but not students, to get out of debt.
4. Defund Government Until Privatization Seems Like the Only Option
This has happened most notably in education, with a simple formula, according
to The
Nation: "Use standardized tests to declare dozens of poor schools
'persistently failing'; put these under the control of a special unelected
authority; and then have that authority replace the public schools with
charters." And, of course, cut funding. According to the Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities, forty-eight states — all except Alaska and
North Dakota — were spending less per student in 2014 than they did before the
recession.
It's happening to Social Security, perhaps the most efficiently run system,
public or private, in our nation's history. As Richard
Eskow notes, "Congress has cut 14 out of the last 16 SSA budget requests.
There’s only one rational explanation for that: a hostility toward government
itself, combined with the determination to place more public resources in
corporate hands through 'privatization.'”
It's happening to police
forces, which are going private in neighborhoods and on corporate campuses
as public money is disappearing.
5. Remain Ignorant of Any Troublesome Facts
Facts abound of failing private systems, including:
Education: A private system that pays a charter CEO 350
times more per student than the corresponding public school chancellor.
Health Care: The most expensive system in the developed world,
with the price of common
surgeries anywhere from three to ten times higher than in much of Europe,
and with 43
percent of sick Americans skipping doctor's
visits and/or medication purchases in 2011 because of excessive costs. Medicare,
on the other hand, which is largely without the profit motive and the competing
sources of billing, is efficiently run,
for all eligible Americans.
Banking: Thanks to private banks, interest claims one
out of every three dollars that we spend, and by the time we retire with a
401(k), nearly
half of our money is lost to the banks. But the public bank of North Dakota
(BND) had an equity return of 23.4% before the
state's oil boom. The normally privatization-minded Wall
Street Journal admits that the BND "is more profitable than Goldman Sachs
Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn’t
seen profit growth drop since 2003."
Law Enforcement: As public money for police protection is
depleted, our communities are being subjected to law enforcement officers who
are insufficiently
trained, poorly
regulated, and often unaccountable to
the public for
their actions.
Water Management: A water security expert suggested that
"One promising solution is to create water markets that allow people to buy and
sell rights to use water." But a 2009 analysis of water and sewer utilities by
Food and Water Watch found that
private companies charge up to 80 percent more for water and 100 percent more
for sewer services.
The Environment: According to former World Bank Chief
Economist Nicholas
Stern, climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has seen."
Yet Bloomberg reports
that "Wall Street firms are investing in businesses that will profit as the
planet gets hotter."
Government Itself: In a study of outsourcing, the Project
on Government Oversight found that in 33 out of 35 cases "the average annual
contractor billing rate was much more than the average annual full compensation
for federal employees."
Great Individuals Emerge from Cooperative Efforts
Privatization is closely connected to the demand for individualism over
cooperation. But the belief that self-centeredness will benefit everyone is
backwards. As George
Lakoff summarizes: "The Public provides freedom...Individualism begins after
the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical
research has cured their diseases..."Paul Buchheit
teaches economic inequality at DePaul University. He is the founder and
developer of the Web sites UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org and
RappingHistory.org, and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions
and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.
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