What’s wrong with privatization of government functions?

In some instances maybe little or nothing is wrong with privatization of government functions. But the neoconservative aim is to privatize nearly all government functions including military functions even including in the field soldiering.

The Libertarians also want to privatize nearly everything the government does. However, the motivation is different for each group. The Libertarians actually believe that the federal government should function only as described originally in the Constitution of the United States. They hold individual liberty as the highest ideal and view any expansion of government beyond the original conception to be an infringement on individual liberty. I can respect their point of view and their consistency.

The neoconservatives, on the other hand, want to privatize everything just so private sector companies can make profit off of providing the same functions that the federal government does now. They don’t want the government to shrink. Instead they want to transfer government functions to the private sector. Their rationale is that the private sector would be more efficient than the government. But there is a major flaw in this way of thinking.

Take soldiering for example. When Paul Bremer went to Iraq to oversee the beginning of reconstruction and nation building activities his security detail was not made up of members of the United States military. The same is also true for every ambassador to Iraq since then. They were mercenaries from a company called Blackwater with which the State Department made a lucrative contract (see Jeremy Scahill’s book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army-his picture accompanies this post). The members of that security detail were paid on the order of $600.00 per day to protect the ambassador. Even elite members of the U.S. military do not get paid nearly that much. Thus privatization of that function cost American taxpayers far more than if uniformed service members performed it.

The neoconservatives want privatization of most government functions to happen in one of two ways. One, the U. S. government could pay out the same amount of money as it does now for all the functions it needs but some not small portion of it would go to profit for private companies providing the services thus reducing the level of services the government receives for that money. This would clearly be far less bang for the buck for American taxpayers. Two, the government could pay far more than it does now to receive the same level of services in order to cover the profit to private providers of the services. Either way American taxpayers get screwed while a handful of private companies leech billions from the U. S. treasury. The opportunistic neoconservatives see a ripe plum in federal spending and want to pluck it instead of being creative and thinking of better mousetraps as a way to make more profit. All of this is not to mention the accountability and control issues that I’ll discuss in a later post.