A young girl walks to receive free back-to-school supplies from the Fred Jordan Mission on Skid Row in Los Angeles, California.
Credit: Reuters / Lucy Nicholson

The Trump campaign’s clarion call is that his chief qualification as a statesman is his roaring success in business. Leaving aside the dubiousness of his claims, what about the assumption that government should be run more like a “free enterprise”? We can discuss the major campaign issues in terms of the track record of government privatization over the years, and how they relate to the issue that neither of the leading candidates is talking about enough: inequality.

In a compendium of privatization disasters, the watchdog group In the Public Interest (ITPI) concludes that “government privatization disproportionately hurts poor individuals and families.” By shifting social costs onto the public, the market logic of “personal responsibility” serves as a […]