The trouble with the provision of public services such as health, education and the police by private for-profit companies is pretty obvious. Successive governments from Thatcher on, have pursued this flawed policy which derives from a hopelessly simplistic ideology. Private providers, who are subject to the discipline of the market, are held to be more efficient than public providers. The late lamented Milton Friedman claimed they were twice as efficient. Therefore, the argument goes, services would be most efficiently provided by private firms operating in competitive markets so that, for example, NHS patients have choice, and providers who are not good enough to get chosen, will fail. That’s how markets work.
So far so good, despite the famous lack of supporting empirical evidence, and the difficulties, where real markets don’t exist, of creating pseudo-markets without the costly bureaucracy of targeting, monitoring and supervising pseudo-competitive performance. But another thread of that same ideology, most famously enunciated by the same late lamented Friedman, is that those who run for-profit businesses have no social responsibility other than to make as much money as possible for shareholders.
Continue reading Public Services and Predatory Shareholders
Fighting for Fairness by Remaking the Real Economy 