The Disaster of Privatizing Everything (w/ Donald Cohen)

You name it, it's been privatized somewhere in the United States. Schools, roads, libraries, courts, prisons, and even the law itself have been outsourced to private companies by state and local governments who buy into the idea that The Private Sector is more efficient at serving the functions of government. But this is baloney, as Donald Cohen shows in The Privatization of Everything How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (co-written with Allen Mikaelian). Cohen, the founder and executive director of In The Public Interest, joins today to take us through case studies of privatization in action, like Chicago's disastrous deal to sell its parking meters.

Cohen shows us that when we privatize, we are turning our own assets over to someone else who will sell them back to us and pocket our money. He explains why privatization is a bad deal and why public goods and services should remain in public hands. There is a right-wing effort to stigmatize public services as Big Government (calling public schools "government schools" for instance), and Cohen makes the case for why we need a pro-public culture that unashamedly demand that what belongs to the people stays in the hands of the people.

"Understanding privatization means understanding that it is first and foremost a political strategy. It was born this way, and so it remains, but it has also become a grab for billions of dollars in contracts and fees. In the years since it sprang from the mind of Milton Friedman as a way to undercut government “monopoly,” it has also become a way for profiteers to tap into the $7 trillion of public revenue (which swelled to $9 trillion during the COVID crisis) spent by local, state, and federal government agencies each year and carve out a piece (sometimes a very big piece) for themselves. Privatization has also in recent history become remarkably bipartisan—Democratic president Bill Clinton arguably did more for the privatization project than did his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan. And it has become surprisingly pervasive, to the point where there are now 2.6 times as many federal government contractors as there are government employees, and there is literally no public good that is not at risk of being privatized." — from "The Privatization of Everything"