Privitization

Privatization. What is it? The government can’t longer afford do anything so they outsource services to the lowest bidder. Education is outsourced. Jails are outsourced. In Indiana even the toll roads have been outsourced , the state selling it for next to nothing to a private unelected company who then jacks up the tolls and fleece the people who the politicians supposedly represent.

I’m reminded of a story I saw on one of those PBS science shows of a party of nineteenth century British sailors whose boat was stranded in the northern Canadian ice. For some reason the party abandoned ship and began dragging the captain’s desk for miles in the wrong direction away from the place where they could be rescued. One sailor died and was buried in the ice. The party was eventually rescued. More than a hundred years later the dead sailor’s body, still preserved in the ice, was found. He was exhumed and the scientists found traces of lead in his body. They went back in the records and found that the company that had outfitted the expedition had never done so before but they had received the contract to do so because they were the lowest bidder. The director of the show surmised that the company had accidentally given the crew lead poisoning.

This was just another case of public servants hiring companies that don’t necessarily serve the public well. They get away with it more easily when the people they are serving are powerless and unimportant like: the elderly, children, the mentally ill, or minorities - all of which fall into the category of others whose problems people continue to want to bury because it distracts them from the lives they’d like to lead.

Years ago: the state of Massachusetts realized how expensive running services could be and they gradually began jettisoning them onto the lowest bidder. They began to take bids from whoever said they could do a job better, for cheaper. Once the state learned that a company could do it cheaper, they lost interest in whether they were doing it better. Money was there for a public/private partnership to divvy up and I don’t think Massachusetts is unique.

The way kids are treated in these programs is often deplorable. It isn’t that so much of the public hates kids. They actually probably love their own kids very much. It’s that too many of them hate other peoples’ kids and they don’t see why they have to pay for them either.

What is privatization? It is undemocratic and it basically says that we can no longer afford to treat our employees or our clients respectfully. Privatization is the one smart, usually politically connected, person making mega dollars by hiring a bunch of idealistic idiots, who are willing to undersell their labor. Those workers will tell themselves that they’re doing it for the children or the elderly because they can‘t face the fact that they are just really another commodity.

Privatization is the state withdrawing from responsibility into a world in which no one is responsible for anything. One kid gets killed in a program and everyone points fingers at everyone else who might be responsible. In the end what we are teaching the next generation, that unless things directly concern us, no is responsible for anything. It’s always someone else’s problem. Maybe we should be teaching them a different lesson.