The Insidiousness of Privatising Public Services.

On Wednesday, March 31 2010, the Californian carried an editorial arguing that Saturday mail delivery should be abolished in the interest of saving money. The editorial, dripping with anti-government sentiment, stated that "The U.S. Postal Service is gushing red ink like, well, the rest of the federal government …" To help stop this "gushing" the Californian argues that Saturday mail delivery should be abandoned. In effect the argument is that because the Postal Service is not making money, actually loosing it,, its service should be truncated. This is a free market argument and should have nothing to do with government services, which are not intended tg make a profit. While cost controls are necessary, they are not to be determined by the private sector. Until 1970 the Postal Service was known as the Post Office Department, one of two departments specifically required by the Constitution and whose head was a member of the President's cabinet. As a result of the Postal workers strike, because of abysmally low pay and poor working conditions, President Nixon in 1970 pushed through the act creating the United States Postal Service, a private entity. From that point on what was a tax-supported public service became a for profit operation and thereby a suitable target for conservative maligning. The Post Office was set up as a government service in the Constitution, not unlike the military or the court system. Conservatives have repeatedly pulled this game of privatizing a public service and then criticizing it on private sector criteria. They are trying the same thing with a national health care plan, but are having a hard time because the exorbitant costs of private sector health care have been long established and glaring.

Under Ronald Reagan this was no longer a game. It became policy to appoint government agency heads with the specific intent of weakening or abolishing those agencies. It is interesting that people can be sent to jail for plotting to overthrow the government, but when Newt Gingrich's Republicans refused to fund the federal government or Ronald Reagan set about systematically destroying it or when Grover Norquist says it must be drowned in a bathtub not a peep was or is heard.

This kind of argument is endemic to the conservative mind set, namely, that the profit-driven sector should be the measure of public services. It is erroneous, if not malicious, in its assumption not only in measuring services by profit measurement alone, but even in assuming that profit-driven services can out perform the public sector even on a cost basis. Health care cost in this country compared to that of other industrialized countries is a glaring example.

I first noticed the technique now being employed to attack the Postal Service when, in the early 1960s, I was a librarian at the Los Angels Public Library. I had responsibility for the printing collection. The trade magazines were running articles on California's decision to transfer the printing of the election ballots from the state printer to a commercial firm that said they could do it cheaper. The name of that game was to continuously deny the state printer funds to upgrade its equipment until it was made sufficiently inefficient to warrant transferring its business to the private sector. Similarly, by refusing to make e-mail a public service under the Postal Service even though e-mail Internet service providers (ISPs) were using the government-built Internet, conservatives now use the adverse impact of e-mail as another reason to cut back on Postal Service funding. E-mail, as part of the Postal Service, could have been much more productively integrated with regular mail service.

Over all this privatization gambit is but one conservative strategy as it has laid siege to our government. Government can become inefficient, but the remedy is not to turn its functions over to the for-profit sector, which has no fundamental concern, not can it have, for citizen well being. Nor is it a shining example of efficiency as is amply demonstrated by the automobile industry. Progressives need to dispel this Regan-generated myth, which has of late generated the practice of depriving employees of legally required benefits and the government of taxes by declaring employees as contractors. And these people are the shining examples of how our society should be run?

Bob Newhard