Making Economic Sense
Making
Economic Sense
by Murray Rothbard
(Contents
by Publication Date)
Chapter 40
What to Do Until Privatization Comes
Free-market advocates are clear about what should
be done about government services
and operations: they should be privatized. While there is considerable
confusion about how the
process should be accomplished, the goal is crystal-clear. But apart
from trying to speed up
privatization, and also forcing that process indirectly by slashing the
budgets of government
agencies, what is supposed to be done in the meantime? Here,
free-marketeers have scarcely
begun to think about the problem, and much of that thinking is
impossibly muddled.
In the first place, it is important to divide
government operations into two parts: (a) where
government is trying, albeit in a highly inefficient and botched
manner, to provide private
consumers and producers with goods and services; and (b) where
government is being directly
coercive against private citizens, and therefore being
counter-productive. Both sets of operations
are financed by the coercive taxing power, but at least Group A is
providing desired services,
whereas Group B is directly pernicious.
On the activities in Group B, what we want is not
privatization but abolition. Do we
really want regulatory commissions and the enforcement of blue laws
privatized? Do we want the
activities of the taxmen conducted by a really efficient private
corporation? Certainly not. Short
of abolition, and working always toward reducing their budgets as much
as we can, we want
these outfits to be as inefficient as possible. It would be best for
the public weal if all that the
bureaucrats infesting the Federal Reserve, the SEC, etc. ever did in
their working lives was to
play tiddlywinks and watch color TV.
But what of the activities in Group A: carrying the
mail, building and maintaining roads,
running public libraries, operating police and fire departments, and
managing public schools,
etc.? What is to be done with them? In the 1950s, John Kenneth
Galbraith, in his first
widely-known work, The Affluent Society, noted
private affluence living cheek-by-jowl with
public squalor in the United States. He concluded that there was
something very wrong with
private capitalism, and that the public sector should be drastically
expanded at the expense of the
private sector. After four decades of such expansion, public squalor is
infinitely worse, as all of
us know, while private affluence is crumbling around the edges.
Clearly, Galbraith's diagnosis
and solution were 180-degrees wrong: the problem is the public sector
itself, and the solution is
to privatize it (abolishing the counterproductive parts).
But what should be done in the meantime?
There are two possible theories. One, which is now
predominant in our courts and among
left-liberalism, and has been adopted by some libertarians, is that so
long as any activity is public,
the squalor must be maximized. For some murky reason, a public
operation must be run
as a slum and not in any way like a business, minimizing service to
consumers on behalf of the
unsupported "right" of "equal access" of everyone to those facilities.
Among liberals and
socialists, laissez-faire capitalism is routinely denounced as the "law
of the jungle." But this
"equal-access" view deliberately brings the rule of the jungle into
every area of government
activity, thereby destroying the very purpose of the activity itself.
For example: the government, owner of the public
schools, does not have the regular right
of any private school owner to kick out incorrigible students, to keep
order in the class, or to
teach what parents want to be taught. The government, in contrast to
any private street or
neighborhood owner, has no right to prevent bums from living on and
soiling the street and
harassing and threatening innocent citizens; instead, the bums have the
right to free "speech" and
a much broader term, free "expression," which they of course would not
have in a truly private
street, mall, or shopping center.
Similarly, in a recent case in New Jersey, the
court ruled that public libraries did not have
the right to expel bums who were living in the library, were clearly
not using the library for
scholarly purposes, and were driving innocent citizens away by their
stench and their lewd
behavior.
And finally, the City University of New York, once
a fine institution with high academic
standards, has been reduced to a hollow shell by the policy of "open
admissions," by which, in
effect, every moron living in New York City is entitled to a college
education.
That the ACLU and left-liberalism eagerly promote
this policy is understandable: their
objective is to make the entire society the sort of squalid jungle they
have already insured in the
public sector, as well as in any area of the private sector they can
find to be touched with a public
purpose. But why do some libertarians support these "rights" with equal
fervor?
There seem to be only two ways to explain the
embrace of this ideology by libertarians.
Either they embrace the jungle with the same fervor as left-liberals,
which makes them simply
another variant of leftist; or they believe in the old maxim of the
worse the better, to try to
deliberately make government activities as horrible as possible so as
to shock people into rapid
privatization.
If the latter is the reason, I can only say that the strategy is both
deeply
immoral and not likely to achieve success.
It is deeply immoral for obvious reasons, and no
arcane ethical theory is required to see it;
the American public has been suffering from statism long enough,
without libertarians heaping
more logs onto the flames. And it is probably destined to fail, because
such consequences are too
vague and remote to count upon, and further because the public, as they
catch on, will realize that
the libertarians all along and in practice have been part of the
problem and not part of the
solution.
Hence, libertarians who might be sound in the
remote reaches of high theory, are so
devoid of common sense and out of touch with the concerns of real
people (who, for example,
walk the streets, use the public libraries, and send their kids to
public schools) that they
unfortunately wind up discrediting both themselves (which is no great
loss) and libertarian theory
itself.
What then is the second, and far preferable, theory
of how to run government operations,
within the goals for cutting the budget and ultimate privatization?
Simply, to run it for the
designed purpose (as a school, a thoroughfare, a library, etc.) as
efficiently and in as business-like
a manner as possible. These operations will never do as well as when
they are finally privatized;
but in the meantime, that vast majority of us who live in the real
world will have our lives made
more tolerable and satisfying.
Previous Page * Next Page