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Saturday, November 24th, 2012

The GOP’s Privatization Pathology

Author:     PAUL KRUGMAN
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     Thursday, 15 November 2012 09:46
Link: The GOP’s Privatization Pathology
Stephan:   I have been holding this story for almost a week waiting for a conservative response, but none has been forthcoming. This essay makes a very important point that explains why under Republican Administrations the government seems so inept, a point the general media simply has not seemed to grasp. If you don't think government is capable of properly doing anything, your assessment will result in policies that confirm your expectations. It is a political philosophy that seems to be very seductive to people who either can't or won't think very deeply, but history has shown how utterly bankrupt this Randian worldview is. We can see it play out in the present moment with the privatization of prisons and schools and the results that has wrought.

Let me take a moment to flag an issue others have been writing about in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy: The weird Republican obsession with killing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Kevin Drum, a political blogger at Mother Jones magazine, has the goods: they just keep doing it.

‘At a deep ideological level, Republicans believe that federal bureaucracies are inherently inept,’ Mr. Drum wrote on Oct. 30, ‘so when Republicans occupy the White House they have no interest in making the federal bureaucracy work. And it doesn’t. Democrats, by contrast, take government services seriously and appoint people whose job is to make sure the federal bureaucracy does work. And it does.’

George Bush the elder turned the agency into a dumping ground for hacks, with bad results; Bill Clinton revived the agency; President Bush the younger ruined it again; President Obama revived it again; and Mitt Romney – with everyone still remembering Brownie and Katrina! – said that he wanted to block-grant and privatize it. (Even TV news didn’t let him Etch-A-Sketch that comment away).

There’s something pathological here. It’s really hard to think of a public service less likely to be suitable for privatization, and given the massive inequality of impacts by […]

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