Did You Know - Privitization

I've talked about the issue of privatization before in my blog. Here's some stuff, much better written than I have the patience to produce, from Darksyde at the Daily Kos...

One of the corner stones of conservative ideology over the years has been privatization of government services. The idea is that commercial businesses, competing on a level playing field and operating in an efficient market, will bid on delivering superior services, say for example driver's licenses, at lower cost than bloated government bureaucracies performing the same or similar tasks. The government then acts less as a provider of services and more as a watchdog, and together with consumers, determines which businesses will flourish. Taxpayers benefit from the diversity of choices, a better product or service, the reduced cost, and the economic stimulus of new jobs and markets the private concerns bring to the community. It's not a universally bad idea, but it's not a universal solution either. Because some services are not profitable and never will be.

My earlier point is that there are many avenues for abuse of the privatization format - including the awarding of no-bid contracts (think Halliburton) and huge ( and I mean HUGE) salaries, kickbacks and bribery for those bids. The following from the same article...

Over the last few years a mutant version of privatization has arisen among neoconservatives that turn all the advantages of private enterprise, as well as the disadvantages of bureaucracy, upside down. In the neocon incarnation, the level playing field is dissolved in favor of government sanctioned monopolies awarded in secret no-bid contracts. Winning companies are not selected by the market; they are arbitrarily chosen by powerbrokers on the basis of political patronage. Wherever possible the work is either off-shored or performed completely outside our borders. Regulation and oversight are discouraged or eliminated. Worst of all, only the profit is privatized – usually into a tiny number of already obscenely wealthy hands -- while overhead, cost, and losses are offloaded onto the taxpayer: It’s the worst of both worlds and a perfect recipe for thievery and fraud most foul.