Privatize this

Last week, our Congress voted to allow the privatization of food stamps. Our governor, Mitch Daniels, is a strong proponent of privatizing, well, everything. When our governor was a Washington bureaucrat in service to George W. Bush, he said, "The business of government is not to provide services but to make sure that they are provided." As governor, he wants to privatize our roads, essentially selling them to companies who will charge us to drive on them. He wants to privatize hospitals, presumably because government isn't in the business of keeping people alive. With this most recent food stamp go-ahead, Indiana has begun to emulate that bastion of civil justice, Texas, and is looking to put the job of making sure hungry people have food to eat in the hands of a for-profit organization. \nUnfortunately for him and for us, his idea is ill-conceived. Let me tell you why.\nIt is the responsibility of the government to provide us the services we, the people, demand is because the government is the embodiment and manifestation of our will. The government is directly accountable to us. Private companies are not. Oh, certainly there is supposed to be oversight, but that is never as efficient as doing it yourself. It's like leaving your kid (if you have any) with a baby sitter -- he or she might be your kid's best friend or he or she might lock your kid in a closet all night. You'll only know for sure when you get home to check on your kid yourself, and the baby sitter might have covered her tracks of any misdeeds by then. Government might have its problems, but at least we know it's being watched for abuses.\nOne of the most frequently cited reasons for privatization is that it cuts costs. Unfortunately, though, that doesn't seem to be the case. For proof of this, I will point you to a study conducted by the Bush White House. A 2002 study prepared for the Department of Health and Human Services examining government privatization concluded that "the empirical evidence about cost savings through contracting out social services tends to be mixed." While many private contractors seem to provide marginal savings on paper, "cost estimates, however, often do not include the transaction costs entailed in the contracting process." \nAt the same time, private companies that win contracts from the government often recruit from the agencies they are serving. Hiring our bureaucrats means we have to pay them more to do something we were already paying them to do. At the same time, we also need to hire replacements for them. These overhead costs have to come from somewhere, and often as not they come out of the mouths of, in this most recent case, the hungry.\nThose who support privatization speak of it as though it is a magic panacea for all society's ills. Like most things that sound too good to be true, it is.