Any time you hear the word "privatization", you should be scared

[JDPriestly]

42. The problem with privatization is that you are dealing with corporations.

The purpose and goal of a corporation is to make profits for its shareholders. Cutting corners and providing really good service is not and never has been the goal of corporations.

This is not a question of whether corporations are run by bad people or good people. This is the law. If a corporation is not seeking to maximize profit for its shareholders, it is not doing its job.

Sometimes, in maximizing profit, a company finds "new ways" to do things. It innovates. Very often the innovations consist of cutting corners or cheating -- anything to make that bottom line look good, to coax the stock price up.

The incentives, in other words, in private companies are toward taking, toward profit for themselves and inevitably toward misrepresentations, cheating and even stealing.

On the other hand, government answers to the people. Elections are competitive. Campaigns are the time to show yourself and your own ideas in their best light. There is less secrecy (although all too much) in government than in private industry.

Back when small businesses were the rule (maybe even before the industrial revolution), we did not need such a powerful government.

But now that we have huge, multinational corporations, we need strong government to regulate the private sector.

Privatization makes it hard to draw the line between the private sector and the government. Increasingly, corporations become dependent on the government for their contracts and their work. When corporations are as dependent on government contracts for their profits as many of them are today, we have to ask ourselves whether the government is watching and policing them or whether they have simply supplanted the government.

Talk of performance evaluation is absurd in a world in which the private sector is so dependent on the government for contracts and the government can no longer step back and look objectively at the work of corporations. They are too intertwined.

We have privatized government tasks to the extent that the private sector has taken over a lot of the decision-making and work that the government should be doing -- especially in the area of defense.

Interestingly, the last war we really won was WWII. That was the last decisive victory that was of any importance. (Grenada and the Dominican Republic were police actions, not wars.)

And WWII was also the last war we fought without a lot of private contractors mooching off the taxpayers.

Enough said. Point made.