Having spent the summer trying to pay for a "public" education, I find myself becoming more and more conservative, right wing, and Republican every day. During this endeavor I have found myself inquiring about the real world and the economic incentives that make a free market possible. There has been discussion of the "He's-so-Republican-he's-a-Democrat" Ron Paul, who wants to make everything private, and eliminate taxes altogether. Sounds awesome.

To me there are three or four big kahunas that would take careful and cautious steps in order to change:
NASA
Military
Healthcare
Education

NASA and the Military are the two easiest things to take out of the budget, since they can sustain themselves forever off of the patents they create.

Healthcare is harder to change. Politically, a majority of people would never vote for universal health care or an entirely private enterprise. In theory, privatization should make the health care system better, with medical technologies, hospitals, and doctors becoming better through competition. However, in practice, it can be argued that only the healthiest people can afford health care and get checked regularly, whereas the unhealthy people tend to wait until things are uncontrollable and expensive.

Finally, there's the huge education debate. Most of the arguments have already been debated ad nauseam in the Chit Chat section (message_topic.aspx?topic=483701). This is the most fragile thing to change to an entire private institution, since it affects everybody's life and brings up questions about socioeconomics, race relations, and entitlement. The hardest thing about an entire private school system would be the transition as all the best teachers would instantly go to where there's the most money (ie established schools that are predominantly white with a LOT of resources). This would leave inner city schools in the dark for a couple years, maybe forever, because of the negative feedback loop of teachers that leave, leaving students that never learn, that come back as a teacher because of demand.

What do the sages of The Wolf Web have to say about this?

7/23/2007 4:51:54 PM

Even the most die hard libertarians I don't think would seriously consider privatizing the military.

7/23/2007 4:57:34 PM

that's the one of the 4 i believe cannot and should not become private.

7/23/2007 5:00:28 PM

Quote :

"The hardest thing about an entire private school system would be the transition as all the best teachers would instantly go to where there's the most money (ie established schools that are predominantly white with a LOT of resources)."

They're already teaching there.

You can privatize education in 3 easy steps.

1. Eliminate the DOE. However, still collect tax funds that would normally go to the DOE.
2. Give said tax to poor children as vouchers. Refund the excess back to the public.
3. Eliminate public schools.

7/23/2007 5:02:22 PM

Apparently Rumsfeld and Cheaney are huge proponents of the private military, hence the unprecedented use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As far as the military being able to "support itself" off of patents? umm.... are you on crack? A private military would only be able to support itself from huge payouts from the government, who would pay it to fight wars. So.... the government would still pay them, it would just be through a private corp first instead of directly to the military. Unless, of course, you expect groups of people to band together and say "hmmm, let's do a fund-raiser for $50 billion and send Blackwater over to the middle east to wage a war for us"

NASA still requires some support from the government for certain missions. The cost, payoff, and timelines for NASA's most ambitious programs would not fly in the public sector. at least, not yet. Not to mention, it's not that huge of a hit, at 1.6% of the total budget
http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/9366/thebudgetgraphcom3000vu8.jpg

[Edited on July 23, 2007 at 5:09 PM. Reason : .]

7/23/2007 5:09:03 PM

Quote :

"2. Give said tax to poor children as vouchers. Refund the excess back to the public."

ok, and this would work for how many years......?

7/23/2007 5:11:09 PM

wow.....

private military = bad, very very bad idea
private healthcare = monopoly
private education = just plain wrong. you're telling me i wouldn't have the right to an education just cuz i was poor. yet how do i get the money to get the education so that i can pull myself out of poverty...

private nasa = not too sure about this one although considering we deal with a lot of national security stuff in space.

our government was founded with the intention of being a limited government. that doesn't mean "no govt programs, no social benefits" etc, it means limited in terms of our inalienable rights. our human rights, our social rights, our liberty and our right to live. but sometimes in order to make sure that all of our citizens get their rights recognized, you have to nationalize, make sure a central authority, ie the government, has oversight on it.

7/23/2007 5:21:37 PM

Quote :

"I find myself becoming more and more conservative, right wing, and Republican every day."

Good for you.
Although there are many GOP politicians who are hardly conservative these days.

Quote :

"the most die hard libertarians I don't think would seriously consider privatizing the military. "

Given the condition of gov't and the political climate, many things would have to change towards liberty before the military could be privitized. But it could be done.

Quote :

"you're telling me i wouldn't have the right to an education just cuz i was poor."

You wouldn't have a right to an education even if you were rich. A right is something you own that doesn't require anyone else from giving up their property in order for you to enjoy that right.

You may have a right to persue an education, at your own cost and effort. But you do not have a right to get an education paid for by everyone else's hard work.

Quote :

"private healthcare = monopoly"

Actually .. socialized medicine would be a gov't monopoly. Try getting medical care outside the gov't system and see how long it takes before your sick self is behind bars.

Quote :

"our government was founded with the intention of being a limited government."

Well that part is correct!
The Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights was designed to limit the power of the state over the individual. After two centuries, this system has almost regressed into a totalitarian state as is the case with most gov'ts. Amazing it's lasted this long though, isn't it?

But the idea was to protect the individual from the onlsaught of the collective/society. I don't believe the founders set it up to create a welfare state..where everyone demands money and property from everyone else and calls it a right.

[Edited on July 23, 2007 at 8:36 PM. Reason : .]

7/23/2007 8:35:11 PM

Quote :

"You may have a right to persue an education, at your own cost and effort. But you do not have a right to get an education paid for by everyone else's hard work."

what if, say..... getting an elementary education is required by law? then what happens if you can't pay for it.

7/23/2007 8:50:06 PM

is it possible? yes
is it a good idea? hell no

7/23/2007 8:55:55 PM

^^

Education is a critical aspect of being a productive person. Having the gov't command everyone to get an education is ridiculous.

7/23/2007 9:12:07 PM

alright then.
as long as your view on required education is consistent your view of (lack of) public funding, then i guess there's no arguing with that.....

i guess you're completely fine potentially very smart, albeit poor, people just going into trade jobs like their parents because they can't afford to go to elementary or high school.

[Edited on July 23, 2007 at 9:26 PM. Reason : .]

7/23/2007 9:24:33 PM

i'm sorry, but humans do have a right to education. and again, if you don't give them the means to get an education then you increase poverty. how do you solve poverty?

Quote :

"The Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights was designed to limit the power of the state over the individual. After two centuries, this system has almost regressed into a totalitarian state as is the case with most gov'ts. Amazing it's lasted this long though, isn't it? But the idea was to protect the individual from the onlsaught of the collective/society. I don't believe the founders set it up to create a welfare state..where everyone demands money and property from everyone else and calls it a right."

they were designed to protect the individual from the onslaught of a MONARCHY. not a society. the pilgrims left england because the MONARCHY was trying to force everyone into ONE religion. the rebels declared independence because the MONARCHY was trying to CONTROL every aspect of their lives, not because they were trying to escape the monarchy from making sure every citizen had access to anything concerning their rights.

and again, pursuing an education at your own cost and effort? well obviously the effort is made to get a job, but you can't get a job without education. you can't afford education without a job.

you may say "well you can do min wage jobs till you save enough"

yea, ok, and by the time i'm 45 (assuming i can live on min wage plus the bs pay raises associated with it) i can finally get my highschool degree. yay, off to be a productive member of society for 20 years

keep in mind the colonists were fine with taxes until they were absolutely back breaking and ridiculous. the colonists had no problem paying taxes, and considering that, why should any of us have a problem paying taxes into a system that betters our nation as a whole? the problem is when it's back breaking and the only reason we haven't found a solution to the inequality is because people run into their corners with bullshit like "it won't work" instead of sitting down, researching, trying solutions, and finding something that works. there is a solution to every problem in the universe, you just have to work hard enough to find it

[Edited on July 23, 2007 at 9:30 PM. Reason : jank]

7/23/2007 9:26:48 PM

I'm only going to address one of these, the idea of a private military. Going into it in depth could take up a whole book but in short:

1) The military puts far more money into R&D than it could ever get out of patent sales.
2) "A private military would only be able to support itself from huge payouts from the government, who would pay it to fight wars" correct, which means it is in their best interest to create war, which is not in the economic best interest of the world.
3) A for profit military turns its interests inward instead of outward. When it becomes a self sustaining machine there is no reason for it not to use its power to take over the government in order to continue to feed its strength. A military could be privatized, in theory, but a private military is anathema to the idea of a free market. The free market assumes low barriers to entry and large numbers of relatively equal companies competing to produce the best value for price possible. The barriers to entry into the military "market" as well as the governments complete lack of ability to check their use of force (through their own lack of a military) would concentrate an inordinate amount of power in the hands of a military elite accountable to no one.

Seriously, think this one out.

7/23/2007 9:47:52 PM

good answer.

but AFAIK, theres only one idiot here who would suggest a privatized military: the OP.

i could be wrong tho. TWW has an ability to bring out the stupid.

7/23/2007 9:56:36 PM

^^ nail on the head

the warning of the military-industrial complex. sound familiar?

7/23/2007 10:12:42 PM

I knew I had oversimplified everything. Thanks for the insight.

7/23/2007 10:14:31 PM

Everyone is mixing terminology here.

You can privatise education without making it cost anything for the user. It is called education vouchers; if the vouchers are greater than most or all available private schools then education is universal and free without attending a government run monopoly.

All privatization means is "not government owned", it says nothing about funding. You can even have a privatized healthcare system while maintaining free and universal coverage. What you do is have the government set payments, similar to vouchers, so it will pay a fixed amount for procedures and then hospitals compete for customers. Hospitals could charge more than the voucher, but charging patients would not increase patronage.

Another means of privatization is through regional competition. The companies set prices and services in advance and then the people vote on which company will be allowed to operate in their county. If a company offers good service at good prices (still paid for through taxes) then people in neighboring counties will tend to select them to replace their current providers. Or, if their services and prices become inferior to their competitors then they risk being thrown out of the county.

Regional monopolistic competition may sound weird for healthcare, but it is ideally suited for police and fire protection, since it rarely makes sense to have two security companies protecting the same neighborhood (it is redundant and prone to free-rider problems).

Most cities spend an average of $20 per month per person providing police protection, yet we see how little protection is actually provided to inner city neighborhoods (only abandoned neighborhoods manage to pay less than this in property taxes). It is because the rich suburbs have the political power in most cities, so when police protection is rationed through the political process, the poor lose out. Privatization would make sure the money was spent where it was supposed to be, not siphoned away to help pay for services to the rich. It is no accident that you are more likely to see nice cars in a poor neighborhood than you are effective police protection. Car makers must compete for the money of the poor, the police do not.

7/23/2007 10:26:02 PM

I already mentioned above that the money the DOE gets would be distributed to everyone, in other words, everyone would get a $10,000 stipend/yr or whatever. Then, upon need based situations, more woudl be given to children who cannot afford it.

EVERYONE who is poor and wants to go to college can... Why can't this work for primary education?

What does increase poverty is keeping inner city kids in failing schools until they finally just drop out because the system failed them. How are you helping them?

By keeping the structure we have, you're not helping them.


If the kids are allowed free, private education (an institution that has a vested interest in graduating children... after all, that's their bottom line) they can lift themselves out of poverty.

7/23/2007 10:26:45 PM

Complete privatization is neither possible nor desirable. Most of our laws and regulations have been in place to help mitigate the effect of market failures and market based externalities that our society finds abhorrent.

[Edited on July 23, 2007 at 10:31 PM. Reason : .]

7/23/2007 10:31:16 PM

Scuba Steve, no one here has said anything about eliminating laws or regulations. Spontaneous is talking about privatization, which usually involves the creations of even more laws and regulations than we already have.

You are mistaking "privatization" for either "marketization" or "anarchy"

We are talking about getting rid of socialism, not adopting freedom.

7/23/2007 10:35:52 PM

Quote :

"The barriers to entry into the military "market" as well as the governments complete lack of ability to check their use of force (through their own lack of a military) would concentrate an inordinate amount of power in the hands of a military elite accountable to no one."

As I said, it would be too difficult to have both a gov't and and private military. Gov't is basically coersive force.

But could we at least stop using the military offensively? How can we expect to bring peace to the world when we can't even bring peace to the streets of our own country?

Quote :

"no one here has said anything about eliminating laws or regulations. "

I am.
We have way too many laws and regulations today. Politicians are going crazy with trans-fat bans and OSHA attempts to ban bullets. And if you look closely, many so-called market failures have had the gov't stink all over them. Many problems were the result of a business using gov't to enforce its will or grant it special privilages.

7/24/2007 12:41:12 AM

I do not think privatizing the military is a very good idea.

As far as NASA I think the gov't should fund research but stop subsidizing launches on shit that could be handled by private companies. It is kinda complicated but if you do your research you will find that the gov't maintains a virtual monopoly on space but at the cost of the taxpayers.

Education is kinda complicated but if nothing else it needs a major overhaul.

Lastly i was not aware that health care was not already mostly "privatized" except for providing health care to the poor and elderly

7/24/2007 12:47:25 AM

This entire argument is silly.

And you are forgetting dozens, if not hundreds, of federally funded programs we rely on.

To name a few: Interstate Highways, National Parks and Monuments and Social Security.

I'm a pretty hardcore libertarian, but I recognize the NEED and BENEFIT of having some centralized, representatively controlled organizations.

There's also a difference between privatization and corporatization. I think a lot of you guys forget about that.

NASA could be privatized, but it would fall apart quickly. The organization is not setup to bring in revenue, and to force it to do so would dramatically alter it's mission, not for the better. It's one of the few federal programs I don't think anyone has a problem putting their tax money toward (god I hope not anyway)

The Military shouldn't be privatized either. Then it would basically become a for-hire mercenary service. Again, it's aim and intention is not to raise revenue.

Healthcare could be privatized, but I don't see that as being successful. It would simply end up being a shill organization for the corporate giants. I'd much rather see healthcare socialized completely. At least then everyone would be covered and individuals would end up paying less for coverage over their lifetimes. Not monopolized though, there is still a place for supplemental private insurance.

Education in the form of vouchers should be done. I dont really think this is "privatization", but certainly a much needed balancing reform.

You have to think about the ramifications of all this beyond yourself. Just because YOU may not pay as much in tax doesn't mean you will end up paying less in total. While we do have a lot of retarded shit our tax money goes to, there are still quite a few programs (like the ones you have mentioned) that simply aren't economically sustainable in a private, open market situation.

7/24/2007 2:28:06 AM

^ What kind of "hard core libertarian" are you if you don't even believe healthcare can be marketized?

That said, I highly recommend a book titled The Machinery of Freedom, it is an anarcho-capitalist layout for an entirely coercive-free society. He theorizes that the military for defense against foreign states would be the only difficult part of the structure to maintain, forced to survive primarily on charitable contributions since defense companies have no market incentive to contribute to its upkeep. Of course, in such a productive society it would be cheap to maintain, so it is conceivable for it to subsist through defense drives on TV using patriotic zeal to collect donations or get written into people's will, just as PBS does today. But, the author said, if the military turned out to be the only institution left to government he would not mind in the least.

As for the rest of society, marketization would be largely beneficial. But only an idiot institutes a government monopoly, as exists today in some of the most important markets we have in society such as education, healthcare, law enforcement, and others.

7/24/2007 8:13:27 AM

Quote :

" but I recognize the NEED and BENEFIT of having some centralized, representatively controlled organizations."

It's hard, I agree, for many to think outside the box of government.
Mankind has been utilizing different forms of government, or central authority, for centuries.

Imagine a king in the middle ages thinking that someday there would be no more kings and the the ruled would vote for their leaders. He would've laughed you out of the throne-room. Imagine a serf thinking that there would be a time when people weren't legally tied to the land unable to ever move out of their social station.

Just the same, it's hard for us to imagine a gov't-free society as we try to make our way through an environment where gov't control is impossible to avoid.

But it can be done if we work at it. A Laissez-faire system could flourish someday- with the oppressive hand of gov't removed from our backs -replaced by voluntary economic and social transactions and non-coersion.

[Edited on July 24, 2007 at 10:57 AM. Reason : .]

7/24/2007 10:56:20 AM

Quote :

"Imagine a king in the middle ages thinking that someday there would be no more kings and the the ruled would vote for their leaders. He would've laughed you out of the throne-room. Imagine a serf thinking that there would be a time when people weren't legally tied to the land unable to ever move out of their social station."

These things still exist in modern societies, they just take different names and are perpetuated by different mechanisms.

7/24/2007 10:58:32 AM

^ your attempt to compare two incomparable objects is an attempt to make them equal and therefore squash the opinion that a laissez faire system would benefit society.


Serfdom is entirely different from modern day poverty. Serfs had ZERO opportunity to rise above their current standard of living.

7/24/2007 11:15:51 AM

Serfs got into the situation they were in because they failed as free men. Seems oddly similar to today huh?

7/24/2007 11:20:54 AM

no, actually, it doesn't...

7/24/2007 11:24:19 AM

Maybe you should study up on serfdom and modern day poverty a little bit more then.

7/24/2007 11:31:11 AM

maybe you should study up on serfdom

7/24/2007 11:33:39 AM

You're the one that claimed "two incomparable objects" without really showing what is incomparable about them, even though they are very comparable.

The onus is on you.

7/24/2007 11:36:22 AM

If the modern poor try to avoid work, they can go stay in homeless shelters and eat in soup kitchens. If serfs tried to avoid work, they would be pursued by armed men under orders to either bring them back or kill them as examples.

7/24/2007 11:42:20 AM

Serfs were also capable of gaining wealth and buying their way out of serfdom. It was an exception, just like it is an exception when someone in poverty gets rich.

When freemen (think middle class) had a run of bad luck, they fell into serfdom.

The parallels aren't perfect (nor were they meant to be), but they are good enough to draw them.

7/24/2007 11:45:59 AM

actually, it's a pretty fucking awful comparison. You can't compare them...


strawman...

[Edited on July 24, 2007 at 11:53 AM. Reason : .]

7/24/2007 11:53:28 AM

serfs could not own property, they were property. Therefore, half of everything they earned through trade went to their lord which had both the right and responsibility to use force against them if they refused.

Now, a comparison CAN be made with the poor today. About 8% of everything they earn through trade goes to the government which has both the right and responsibility to use force against them if they refuse. Of course, not all poor individual declare their income, so some pay far less than 8%.

Of course, if all we are doing is drawing parallels, this works for everyone alive today. The lord has been replaced with legislative bodies, and the sword wielding thugs have been replaced with IRS agents and police officers, but even the richest American turns over his percentage.

What we don't have today are free-men, which had a unique relationship in history. Every year they paid their fixed amount of gold to maintain their freedom, regardless of however or whatever they earned through trade.

Today all of us are serfs, giving the lord his percentage. I guess we longed for the security of bondage, and rebuilt our prison a-new. Sure, the lord today is chosen democratically instead of by lineage, but they still take their 50% share (city+county+state+federal).

7/24/2007 12:04:54 PM

Quote :

" Most cities spend an average of $20 per month per person providing police protection, yet we see how little protection is actually provided to inner city neighborhoods (only abandoned neighborhoods manage to pay less than this in property taxes). It is because the rich suburbs have the political power in most cities, so when police protection is rationed through the political process, the poor lose out. Privatization would make sure the money was spent where it was supposed to be, not siphoned away to help pay for services to the rich."

I disagree with your conclusion completely. You did not clarify how would privatization ensure an equitable distribution of police protection. I submit that a private police force would be subject to the same political pressures as a state-controlled police force.

Thought experiment
Let's assume the police force is privatized. Let's also assume that, for whatever reason, the police fail to prevent a string of robberies in a poor neighborhood. Who complains about it? The poor will, of course, and the local media I'm sure will cover it. The police take the heat, and rightfully so. Depending on the severity of the crimes, the police force could jeopardize their contract.

However, what if those robberies happened in a rich community? The media will cover it, the rich will complain, and so will all of the rich folk's political allies. Suddenly you have the major/governor denouncing the private police force, or perhaps coporate business owners crying foul and demanding better protection. The private police force naturally will protect its interests by pleasing its more vocal clients.

This is precisely what's going on today with the current system. I don't see the improvement at all.

7/24/2007 1:10:38 PM

It's funny. Libertarians make the same basic mistake as Communists, which is that they assume that human beings can, as a rule, be trusted to act decently, even altruistically. This is patently false.

Create a private military and eventually it will realize that it has more, and bigger, guns than the society does, and it will take over. Expect everyone to laissez-faire their way through life, and the arguably cleverest or most industrious people will find a way to coerce their neighbors and do it until they have their own fifedom.

And the victims of the mercenaries or the clever neighbor won't resist, at least not successfully. That's why all the altruistic pseudo-anarchist indians that hippies love to talk about are all dead and the government-loving white people are living on their property.

People like freedom, and I think people would like the idea of a little anarcho-capitalist utopia with no government and everybody being rich. But you know what they like more? They like not getting bashed in the head with a rock. They like not having their house burned down. They like peace and stability.

7/24/2007 1:58:56 PM

Just to take something out of the discussion. Education is not really responsible for that much of the national budget. I can't remember the exact stats, but it's somewhere around three percent of the total budget. Also, most of education is paid for by state and county funds, not federal. It varies by state, but on average only about 8 percent of the total money for schools is from the federal government. You could eliminate it entirely and there would definitely need to be some belt tightening, but it's not like the military or social security.

The federal government really can't privatize education. They would have to withhold funding and then somehow convince the states to revamp how they do things, which won't happen.

7/24/2007 2:22:08 PM

Quote :

"Education is not really responsible for that much of the national budget. The federal government really can't privatize education. "

We should close up the fed dept of education. All we do is send them money only to have some of it trickle back IF the states do what the feds demand. Education is too important to let it become fodder for a state/fed rumble match.

Quote :

" ...be trusted to act decently, even altruistically."

As a libertarian-leaning fellow, I think altruism is one of the nastiest concepts ever to infect our culture. One must sacrifice oneself for the good of the whole. This has been used by leaders for ages to carry out endless amounts of tyranny, death and destruction.

At its core, socialism attacks property rights. It is assumed that NO one can be trusted, the state must decide everything for you. You must do your part for society, before you can try to enjoy the fruits of your own labor.

Another very important aspect of liberty is responsiblity. You cannot use force or fraud for gain. Yes there are more clever people in the world who will succeed far beyond what you can even hope, but they cannot do it through coercion. The only ethically use of force is to stop force being used on you.

The Laissez-faire system is one of contracts. If someone cannot be trusted to act ethically, they will find no one to trade with. Unable to live off a welfare state, he will either have to mend his ways or result to violent force where he will face retalitory force in kind.

quote]Create a private military and eventually it will realize that it has more, and bigger, guns than the society does, and it will take over.[/quote]

What is stopping our enormous military from doing just that today? The law?

Quote :

"People like freedom, and I think people would like the idea of a little anarcho-capitalist utopia with no government and everybody being rich. But you know what they like more? They like not getting bashed in the head with a rock. They like not having their house burned down. They like peace and stability"

Not everyone will be 'rich' in a Laissez-faire society, but they will be a lot better off than currently-where they have to work until July for the gov't.
And you can get your head bashed in today. We don't have peace and stablity now. The go'vt police cannot be there 24/7 to protect you from violence. Some politicians are even working to deny your ability to protect yourself.

Under our gov't system, full of laws and regulations, society is still riddled with fraud and violence. There are always going to be predators out there. Why couldn't a market society deal with evil any better than what we have today?

[Edited on July 24, 2007 at 3:26 PM. Reason : .]

7/24/2007 3:25:33 PM

Dear god you are brainwashed.

7/24/2007 3:34:48 PM

Quote :

"You cannot use force or fraud for gain. Yes there are more clever people in the world who will succeed far beyond what you can even hope, but they cannot do it through coercion."

Says who? Who says you can't do it through coercion? Sure, maybe you shouldn't, but so what? Who is going to stop the guy that decides to take over his neighborhood and declare himself warlord? The other people in the neighborhood might fight him, and some of the time they might even win. But most of the time in order to win then the rest of the neighborhood is going to need to organize under leadership, and defeating the bad guy might require needing funds from everybody, and before long you've got Congress.

Quote :

"he will either have to mend his ways or result to violent force where he will face retalitory force in kind."

Where is this retaliation coming from?

Quote :

"What is stopping our enormous military from doing just that today? The law? "

To some extent, it's momentum. The US military is used to being subservient to the US government.

Also, it's because of the kind of people that a government-run standing army attracts. You don't go into the military to get rich unless the military is private. At the end of the day, I don't like the idea of giving the greediest people all our tanks and A-bombs.

Quote :

"We don't have peace and stablity now."

We have a damn sight more than a lot of people who are working with a lot less government. Let's go ask some folks in the Pakistani tribal areas, where the central government is essentially nonexistent, how much they love living in such an unrestricted society. Be sure to ask them their favorite parts. I bet the blood feuds and woman-stonings will rank just below the lack of taxes and the effectiveness of market-run fire departments.

Quote :

" Why couldn't a market society deal with evil any better than what we have today?"

Because the market society is built on the very same evil I'm talking about suppressing! Greed, like most things, is good in moderation. But by itself it is not a sound foundation for a society. It cannot protect itself from the very same monsters that it creates.

The state can shoot the neighborhood warlord. "The market" can't. The market can just sit there and say, "Tsk, tsk, tsk, if you don't play nice nobody will trade with you," and then the warlord will think about it for a second and then shoot or enslave the people who weren't going to trade with him.

Laws and regulations also set boundaries of behavior that are much clearer than your arbitrary and vague "well if you're bad we'll be bad back."

At least now there is some degree of accountability for the people who run our lives. We'd have next to none over the companies which, controlling necessary commodoties, would be doing the same through indirect means. Competition isn't the panacaea. Sometimes you can't refuse to buy a company's products if you disagree with it.

7/24/2007 3:53:26 PM

I'm all for privatizing the Postal Service. I mean seriously, 1st class mail services need competition.

7/24/2007 4:29:30 PM

who said we were only discussing federal?

Erios, in your thought experiment you merely privatized the whole police force into one huge company, which is silly because it fails to take into account dis-economies of scale. With the privatization of the police force there is an assumption that one of the two means of privatization will be used: either direct competition or regional competition. Either mechanism will allow security firms to grow until they are utilizing all the available economies of scale and no further. The arguments over at what point that would be are extensive, but the consensus is that most security firms will tend to police between 10,000 and 100,000 people depending on how rural/urban the area is. Raleigh alone would have several dozen, greater L.A. could have thousands.

In your scenario given, under direct competition the poor individuals that felt unprotected would take their dollars to another security company, directly punishing ineffective companies and rewarding effective ones.

Under regional competition, your firm would indeed be safe in the rich suburbs from competition, but it risks being voted out of the poor neighborhood and replaced with another company.

The theory of privatization rests on the theory that you cannot ignore the needs of your customers if there is a competitor ready and willing to replace you.

Grumpy, your problem is that you somehow believe people become angels upon being elected to government office. What stops the President from declaring himself King and using the military to enslave the nation? They've got the guns to do it, so why not? I chalk it up to brainwashing, and it works. Americans just do not live that way, even if the citizenry is disarmed and clamoring for it.

7/24/2007 4:31:10 PM

i haven't thought about this much, but in your multi-police force scenario, why wouldn't regional wars between rival forces emerge? or at the very least what would keep rival forces from committing crimes (or funding them) in rival territory to make their rivals look bad? in other words, what would keep this model from devolving into basically the mafia?

7/24/2007 4:36:09 PM

Hmm, well, what stops McDonalds from sabotaging a Burger King? Absolutely nothing, which is why it happens from time to time.

Presumably, if one security firm could prove another firm was committing criminal acts against it or its customers, then it would either sue them in civil court or, if arrested in the act, book them and have the city district attorney begin a criminal trial against them. If convicted they would be incarcerated in one of our already privatized prisons. This is, of course, assuming we did not privatize the court system, which would be a can of worms to say the least.

We are not privatizing everything, just the police force, and only to solve the particular problem of politically motivated disparities of police protection. Presumably the disparities between rich and poor end beyond the point of arrest.

[Edited on July 24, 2007 at 4:51 PM. Reason : .,.]

7/24/2007 4:46:54 PM

Quote :

"Education is not really responsible for that much of the national budget."

Money isn't the goal. Efficiency is. We want the best service for the least amount of money. You cannot achieve this with a bureaucracy.

7/24/2007 4:47:01 PM

^^are economically-motivated disparities of police protection better?

just caught this gem:

Quote :

"Presumably the disparities between rich and poor end beyond the point of arrest. "

in what fantasy land does this happen?

[Edited on July 24, 2007 at 5:18 PM. Reason : .]

7/24/2007 4:58:42 PM

I was being sarcastic. But, if you wish to recognize that government monopoly courts are unreliable, you can read The Machinery of Freedom to get an idea how a privately run court system would operate.

Quote :

"are economically-motivated disparities of police protection better?"

Because police protection is funded through property taxes, police protection is one of those that the poor already pay for. Beside that, at $20 a month it is fairly affordable even before you realize a government monopoly costs more to provide less service. Not to mention, in an area unsafe to live in, surely it would be better for the poor to have the option of allocating more money towards better police protection, perhaps $22 a month would get the hoodies off the street; the benefits to their property values alone would cover the expense.

And, again, privatization does not mean marketization. As with education, the collective fear that the poor will stupidly spend too little money for police protection can be alieved by keeping the property taxes in place and providing protection vouchers to land-owners, which they use to buy police protection.

7/24/2007 8:12:37 PM