Privatize THIS!
You know, I grew up hearing it repeated as Gospel that government was way less efficient than the private sector. I guess that’s why we’re hiring private contractors to fight our wars. Why we want to pay corporations to run our schools, run our jails, maybe even ramrod our fire and police departments. They’ll naturally do a better job for way less money.
I’m no economist, but I need more than mantras to make me want to dismantle half of society by gutting and cutting government like it was a sacrificial cow on the altar of unbridled capitalism. Wasn’t it GM and Ford and Chrysler, bastions, capitol B, of capitalism that just got bailed out by the federal government? Not just bailed out, propped up, given CPR, put on life support, brought back to life ….Oh, and brought back to profitability.
And maybe my memory is slipping, but wasn’t it the banks, the mortgage companies, the credit firms who drove this country into the worst recession in more than half a century? Maybe they were what? Too efficient? Too something, that’s for sure.
We complain about government but I don’t see the heads of government agencies or departments pulling down multi-million dollar salaries with huge mega-bonuses and sweetdeal stock options. I guess if we ran them like businesses, we’d inflate that executive pay by, oh, a hundred times or so. See how that helps efficiency. Sort of like paying military contractors way more than our military men and women — maybe why we take 10 years to lose wars now.
So before I wrapped myself in the American flag and started dismantling all our government departments and offer them up like railroad right of ways to the corporations, I’d follow the money a ways and see who exactly is going to profit from that supposed increased performance. Call me cynical and paint a bullseye on my be-hind, but I suspect it’s some of the fellows in corner suites at the top of Wall Street skyscrapers. Even if profits don’t go up, they’ll get a nice bloated package, you bet. Efficiently wrapped.
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