Privatization, Why?

by Ruth A. Sheets

Day after day, the media reports on some kind of attempt to privatize a public service.  This includes education, the military and prisons, among other things.

Like so many other plans put out there, primarily by Republicans and other conservatives, there is no evidence that “private” companies or individuals do a better job than public agencies do, but we are being sold on the myth that public workers get too many benefits and private companies will make those who are sucking public resources really work for all that money they get.

In the military, the private contractors are paid as much as twice or three times the amount our military personnel are being paid for doing essentially the same job. Outrageous!  That is not generally true for the other services currently being privatized, however.  It seems the guys who run the private companies make lots of money while everyone else gets what’s left over. 

When workers are employed by taxpayers, they usually receive some kind of medical benefits subsidized by the taxpayers and they are in some kind of retirement plan.  Private companies have no mandate to make such benefits available to their workers, so even when the actual paycheck is equal, workers take a loss because they have to pay their premiums, if they can afford the added cost.  Unemployment will increase because those public workers will be laid off and replaced by “cheaper workers."  That will really help to stabilize a community, right?

There are efforts abroad to privatize Social Security, Medicare, and other Federal and State programs.  I have seen no evidence that using private companies to do what has been done publicly saves anyone anything.  Once the move is made, there is no evaluation to determine whether or not the move made sense.  Then, it is nearly impossible to go back.

To add to this insanity, often, private for-profit groups are given the contracts for the public services.  That means that someone is going to make money off the process, translation, making money off the taxpayers. That merely adds one more layer of folks feeding at the trough.  And, it is not enough to just make the money back that one has expended, one needs to have a profit to pay investors, which of course, taxpayers pay for.

How are so many people so bamboozled by privatization?  Why are we so anxious to give over our common responsibility for our community to folks who have no stake in the value or quality of the services or the people being served.  These private for-profit companies legally suck directly from the government and can pay workers as little as they can get away with.