A Key Reason America is No Longer Great: The privatization of state and (especially) local governments

[SimpleDon]

This is an odd thread. I have heard of some prisons in the south that have been privatized. I don't know if they are working on not. I suspect, probably not. But we can't debate an issue unless there are some examples that we can debate pro or con. It seems to me that if privatization were a growing problem that we'd have a lot more examples.

I wouldn't exactly call that privatized. I've yet to see one of these "private" prisons that has any private clients. Every single inmate in a "private" prison is sent there by the government. The "private" prison wouldn't exist without its only customer, the government. It is contracted, not privatized.

I've yet to see a private prison. If anyone tried it, however, you'd see the person trying it being sent to a "private" prison for kidnapping, holding people against their will, enslavement, etc.

There are prisons in the US that are built with private capital and run by private corporations. These prisons are run for profit. It is reasonable to call them private, for profit prisons even though it is the government jurisprudence system that sends the prisoners there.

Like most government to private, for profit schemes that save money over the government option they do it by paying lower wages with fewer benefits than government employees receive. Most of the savings from lower wages is converted into profits with just enough applied to the fees that the government pays to save money.

The most obvious example of privatization and the conversion to for profit entities run amuck is our healthcare system. Forty years ago healthcare costs in the US were on par with the rest of the developed world. Then private, for profit corporations started to buy up the hospitals that had previously been non-profit owned by charities or government. After forty years we now pay two to even three times more than the other developed countries. (Referring to medical costs per capita as a percentage of GDP)

Medicare Advantage is another example, when it was passed it included a supposed temporary additional payment of 25% above what it cost the government to be administer the Medicare system. Over time and due to the miracle of competition this extra fee would disappear as the insurance companies competed with one another. It should come as no surprise that the fee has never gone away, although it has been reduced among much protest by the health care insurance companies that they can't do the work for the lower fee accompanied by a public relations campaign that the government is cutting Medicare. This is the source of the claim that ObamaCare was reducing Medicare by 300 million dollars a year. It was, in payments to the private insurance companies, but it wasn't a cut in benefits like the insurance companies hoped that the general public would believe.

Yes, the Medicare Advantage programs include more benefits than standard, government run Medicare. But the insurance companies have to include these extra benefits or no one will buy a Medicare Advantage program, because no Medicare Advantage program is as well accepted as standard Medicare. They pay doctors less than standard Medicare. Government run Medicare pays much faster with less hassle than with any private company.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

I wouldn't exactly call that privatized. I've yet to see one of these "private" prisons that has any private clients. Every single inmate in a "private" prison is sent there by the government. The "private" prison wouldn't exist without its only customer, the government. It is contracted, not privatized.

I've yet to see a private prison. If anyone tried it, however, you'd see the person trying it being sent to a "private" prison for kidnapping, holding people against their will, enslavement, etc.

There are prisons in the US that are built with private capital and run by private corporations. These prisons are run for profit. It is reasonable to call them private, for profit prisons even though it is the government jurisprudence system that sends the prisoners there.

Like most government to private, for profit schemes that save money over the government option they do it by paying lower wages with fewer benefits than government employees receive. Most of the savings from lower wages is converted into profits with just enough applied to the fees that the government pays to save money.

The most obvious example of privatization and the conversion to for profit entities run amuck is our healthcare system. Forty years ago healthcare costs in the US were on par with the rest of the developed world. Then private, for profit corporations started to buy up the hospitals that had previously been non-profit owned by charities or government. After forty years we now pay two to even three times more than the other developed countries. (Referring to medical costs per capita as a percentage of GDP)

Medicare Advantage is another example, when it was passed it included a supposed temporary additional payment of 25% above what it cost the government to be administer the Medicare system. Over time and due to the miracle of competition this extra fee would disappear as the insurance companies competed with one another. It should come as no surprise that the fee has never gone away, although it has been reduced among much protest by the health care insurance companies that they can't do the work for the lower fee accompanied by a public relations campaign that the government is cutting Medicare. This is the source of the claim that ObamaCare was reducing Medicare by 300 million dollars a year. It was, in payments to the private insurance companies, but it wasn't a cut in benefits like the insurance companies hoped that the general public would believe.

Yes, the Medicare Advantage programs include more benefits than standard, government run Medicare. But the insurance companies have to include these extra benefits or no one will buy a Medicare Advantage program, because no Medicare Advantage program is as well accepted as standard Medicare. They pay doctors less than standard Medicare. Government run Medicare pays much faster with less hassle than with any private company.

During my time in the military, I worked along-side both civil servants and contractors. The contractors sat at a government desk doing a government job on a government computer with a government email address. They got a military ID that said "contractor" on it. They company that provided them as labor made a profit by selling labor to the government.

It is an interesting arrangement. Not necessarily a good one, but an interesting one.

Now the name on their paycheck was that of the company that hired them to do that government job. Were they employed in the private sector or the public sector?

While it is very reasonable to call these prisons "for profit" it is not reasonable to call them "private", until and unless even one of them has a single private client. I've yet to see one. Nobody has ever been able to show me one. If anyone can show me one I'll gladly call it a private prison.

Even Medi/Medi doesn't compare to the prisons. The clients are the patients, the insurance is the government. It's an awful mixture of private and public, but it is more private than a for-profit prison. The for-profit prison's status as "private" is so much an illusion that it takes a deliberate effort of will to think that it is private.

 

[laughing dog]

LOL - The "No True Privatization" Fallacy.

Only you could make such a mistake.

Do you even know what it means for something to be private?
Show me a single prison with a private clientele.

A private firm is owned and operated by a person, partners or a corporation. The "private" refers to the ownership not to the clientele.

When an activity or organization is "privatized" that means that it is either run or owned by the private sector not the government, as any literate person who can read a dictionary would know.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

There's that deliberate effort of will I was talking about. I was hoping someone would provide me with an example.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Only you could make such a mistake.

Do you even know what it means for something to be private?
Show me a single prison with a private clientele.

A private firm is owned and operated by a person, partners or a corporation. The "private" refers to the ownership not to the clientele.

When an activity or organization is "privatized" that means that it is either run or owned by the private sector not the government, as any literate person who can read a dictionary would know.

Then we already have private roads since the government uses private firms to do road maintenance and building of roads. I'm curious how many people say we have private roads based on that? Our national defense is also private then since the government contracts out to defense firms.

As Jason said, for privatization the people have to go directly to the private firms to purchase the product/service instead of the government. That's not the case with prisons. Charter and private schools yes.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Maybe we'd get somewhere if people stopped living in the past.

 

[JonA]

Only you could make such a mistake.

Do you even know what it means for something to be private?
Show me a single prison with a private clientele.

A private firm is owned and operated by a person, partners or a corporation. The "private" refers to the ownership not to the clientele.

When an activity or organization is "privatized" that means that it is either run or owned by the private sector not the government, as any literate person who can read a dictionary would know.

In the case of roads the government still owns them and operates them - it is more like the government is buying a single product. With prisons, the private firm owns the service and the government pays for that service on an ongoing basis - the government didn't buy a prison from a prison-making company.

 

[Tigers!]

The first thing we need to do is figure out what's been privatized that shouldn't have been. That's not the type of job that a government bureaucracy would be able to do competently, however, so we should probably outsource that work to the private sector.

Good idea.
You are I need to set up a company to handle that Tom. You work on the Canadian Govt and I'll work on the Aussie and get paid into a Cayman Islands or Swiss account. Or to avoid perceptions of basis I do Canada and you do Aussie.

We probably could not stuff it up any worse than it presently is.

 

[laughing dog]

A private firm is owned and operated by a person, partners or a corporation. The "private" refers to the ownership not to the clientele.

When an activity or organization is "privatized" that means that it is either run or owned by the private sector not the government, as any literate person who can read a dictionary would know.

Then we already have private roads since the government uses private firms to do road maintenance and building of roads.

Are the roads owned by the private firms?

Libertarians wonder why people do not understand them. All one has to look at the idiosyncratic use of language and their tortured logic to explain that confusion.

 

[Jaecp]

Then we already have private roads since the government uses private firms to do road maintenance and building of roads.

Are the roads owned by the private firms?

Libertarians wonder why people do not understand them. All one has to look at the idiosyncratic use of language and their tortured logic to explain that confusion.

Not to mention that all this grammatical quibbling is fucking waste of time.

Everyone here knows what people mean by privatized. Shifting from government administered services to privately administered services.

Then again, it's a pretty decent bit of rhetoric when there isn't any real argument to be made, so props to Jason I guess?

 

[coloradoatheist]

Then we already have private roads since the government uses private firms to do road maintenance and building of roads.

Are the roads owned by the private firms?

Libertarians wonder why people do not understand them. All one has to look at the idiosyncratic use of language and their tortured logic to explain that confusion.

so the prisons decide who goes there? If I wanted to could I pay the prison $250K and have you locked up for several years in there?

The difference is that the the government is still the one who determines who goes to prison and for how long, they are just contracting out who actually owns and runs the prison itself. If prisons were completely privatized then the government would have no role in who uses the prisons.

 

[dismal]

It's pretty disingenuous of Republicans (at all levels) to slash education funding and then turn around and blame mushrooming student debt on school administrative costs.

A good question would be how an American adult could possibly believe education funding has been slashed (at all levels) given the intewebz allow us to access data on education spending and see it obviously hasn't been.

 

[laughing dog]

so the prisons decide who goes there? If I wanted to could I pay the prison $250K and have you locked up for several years in there?

For some obscure reason, you seem to be under the false impression that it is the clientele that determines whether a firm is private or not. Using your reasoning, a landscaping firm that is wholly owned and operated by a person in the private sector is not a private firm if it has a contract to landscape a gov't building.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

^ I would consider it ok so long as all of the important decisions are made by the government and so long as there is no profit motive to screw over citizens in a way not authorized or directed from the democratically elected government. That would seem to be a bit of a problem with these prisons, and with defence contractors that get their people into the government.

I agree that the privatization of government itself is a serious problem. This could also be called corruption. It is a real problem when you have government oversight agencies filled with people who also have interest in profiting from the industries they oversee, or when companies can make gigantic cash "donations" to politicians and pull strings. Sanders is right to balk at Hillary's taking so much money from wall street.

 

[coloradoatheist]

so the prisons decide who goes there? If I wanted to could I pay the prison $250K and have you locked up for several years in there?

For some obscure reason, you seem to be under the false impression that it is the clientele that determines whether a firm is private or not. Using your reasoning, a landscaping firm that is wholly owned and operated by a person in the private sector is not a private firm if it has a contract to landscape a gov't building.

And if we took your landscape example and instead of private parties contacting the landscape companies to do the work, we required everyone to contact the government and arrange the landscaping where in turn the government would then put out contracts to landscaping companies. Would that scenario still have landscaping privatized because the government used private companies? Jason and I would say no.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As for the messed up justice system, I would blame the following:

1) the War on Drugs
2) the Militarization of the Police
3) the get-tough-on crime laws
4) for-profit prisons
5) civil forfeiture
6) the erosion of our fourth, fifth and sixth amendment rights.

Do the libertarians here have any dissections on these?

You see us for any of these things??

I've even started threads complaining about 1, 5 & 6.

 

[laughing dog]

For some obscure reason, you seem to be under the false impression that it is the clientele that determines whether a firm is private or not. Using your reasoning, a landscaping firm that is wholly owned and operated by a person in the private sector is not a private firm if it has a contract to landscape a gov't building.

And if we took your landscape example and instead of private parties contacting the landscape companies to do the work, we required everyone to contact the government and arrange the landscaping where in turn the government would then put out contracts to landscaping companies. Would that scenario still have landscaping privatized because the government used private companies? Jason and I would say no.

The landscaping firms in both examples are private firms - owned and operated in the private sector.

 

[coloradoatheist]

And if we took your landscape example and instead of private parties contacting the landscape companies to do the work, we required everyone to contact the government and arrange the landscaping where in turn the government would then put out contracts to landscaping companies. Would that scenario still have landscaping privatized because the government used private companies? Jason and I would say no.

The landscaping firms in both examples are private firms - owned and operated in the private sector.

But in the case of people having to go to the government to get landscaping done, landscaping would not be considered privatized

 

[Nice Squirrel]

As for the messed up justice system, I would blame the following:

1) the War on Drugs
2) the Militarization of the Police
3) the get-tough-on crime laws
4) for-profit prisons
5) civil forfeiture
6) the erosion of our fourth, fifth and sixth amendment rights.

Do the libertarians here have any dissections on these?

You see us for any of these things??

I've even started threads complaining about 1, 5 & 6.

I didn't think libertarians did. I wanted to bring the discussion down to what we actually need to fight for rather than squabbling over definitions.

 

[coloradoatheist]

As for the messed up justice system, I would blame the following:

1) the War on Drugs
2) the Militarization of the Police
3) the get-tough-on crime laws
4) for-profit prisons
5) civil forfeiture
6) the erosion of our fourth, fifth and sixth amendment rights.

Do the libertarians here have any dissections on these?

You see us for any of these things??

I've even started threads complaining about 1, 5 & 6.

Actually I would say it's all caused by 1 but the tough on crime one is second. The Libertarian position is to eliminate #1