(no subject)

[malsperanza]

Yeah, more politics. Only a few more days, folks.



Some guy named Ken Hines in Athens, Alabama, made this interesting observation in the comments to Krugman's NYT column today:

"As societies have grown from tribes to nations to an international community of billions we have come to rely extensively on two tools to accomplish our goals. The private sector is the way we accomplish goals competitively, and governments are the way we accomplish goals cooperatively. We can only be truly creative if we skillfully use both tools."*

There's something really satisfying to me about this formulation. It echoes the principle that opposing ideas (and strategies), working in tension, produce good outcomes. In other words, it's dialectical thinking, and I like it.

I know of no serious progressive who wants to do away with the private sector or the incentives that open competition offers. Conversely, though, the right wing has responded utter hysteria to the mere idea that cooperation and the public sphere also have a place in civil society. To listen to the howling, you'd think the Mayflower Compact had been written by Lenin.

*Full text here: http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/10/27/opinion/27krugman.html

Comments

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I know it's tough to know where to *start* deploring the havoc caused by Free Market fanatics, but one thing that is *never* going to end well is to assign a task to the private sector that the private sector has no intention of performing because there's no money in it. There will never be a society made up entirely of rich people (not least because managers want to stay rich by not paying their workers all that opulently), and the market is probably always going to fail at housing poor people. An untrammeled insurance industry has already failed at providing health care for sick people, and no matter how many pious platitudes a politician on either side of the aisle mutters about preventive care, there will always be sick people.

And basically BushInc *has* tried outsourcing fighting a war to their private-contractor buddies. How's that workin' out for ya?

[benicek.livejournal.com]

The government here (Britain) tried to make our state healthcare system a bit more competitive by contracting out parts of it to the private sector. They've now found themselves saddled with expensive leases and contracts for years to come. It's wasted millions of pounds. Part of the reason it went so badly was that the companies involved made the elimination of competition a precondition of their bids. They required local monopolies before they'd even consider investing, and that's what they got.

Remember co-operatives. They are neither state nor 'private' in the stock market sense. They compete effectively with the private sector because they don't need to make profits. A large part of the Japanese healthcare system is run by co-operatives. After the Kobe earthquake most of the initial relief effort was co-ordinated by the cooperatives, not the state.