A while back I noted a certain inability to detect a highway project as public because it a) charged tolls and b) provided a good service experience. This was prima face evidence the road must be a private venture.
Once the facts about Denver's E-470 highway are presented, Mitch Berg will grant only the most grudging acknowledgment:
It shows that government, given boundless resources and an open-ended mandate (especially as a small part of a larger money-pit boondoggle, the Denver International Airport project), can occasionally duplicate the benefits of private-sector service, market-orientation and usability.
Then he turns it into a call for building tollways, which lefties are supposed to oppose just as reflexively as the righties oppose... well, pretty much everything government does except wage war against people they don't like and arrest people they don't like.
For the record, I don't oppose tollways, provided they reduce congestion, don’t reduce public access to places we want to go and pay for themselves at least as much as public transit. Privatizing certain public services should not be ruled out as a matter of principle.
But let's get real.
There are industries that specialize in satisfying government requirements — for example, the road construction and arms industries. Their livelihood is pretty well intertwined with public needs. Beyond that, though, the private sector will behave more like my company did, gravitating to where it can make the most money with the least resistance.
In my experience, that was not in government contracting. I made a good living providing services corporate America was incapable of performing for itself. On the other hand, I rarely did work for the government or non-profit sectors because they were tighter with their dollars and much more stringent about specifying what they expected.
Private industry will serve the public interest when it can make a buck, and it is obligated to move on when it isn't. All by itself, that's the reason we should be wary about privatization as our salvation.
How long do you think private industry would keep running a tollway, an immunization program or a retirement plan once the profits dried up?
Government isn't perfect, but neither is it the bumbling, service-deficient, scripture-guided festival of ineptitude and corporate interest the Bush Administration has spent nearly seven years installing at the federal level.
Let's not get hung up on ideologically driven solutions. Let's just solve the problems.
