Verbosities

The Sideshow June 2007 Archive

They can complain all they like that (Bush) hasn't been "fiscally conservative", but they not only supported his war and his tax cuts, but they refused to so much as question the fact that he ran it in the most expensive way imaginable - not just pseudo-privatizing the functions of the armed services, but actually giving the private companies they outsourced to incentives to overspend and generally waste resources. (And they let him force them to pass the drug-benefit bill with a clause forbidding negotiations to keep prices down.)

I say "pseudo-privatizing" because outsourcing government functions but still paying for them from the tax base isn't real privatization, it's socializing it at a higher price. Actually privatizing the invasion and occupation of Iraq would mean that you told all the people who wanted to invade Iraq to go do it themselves. They could club together and raise an army on their own dime and leave the taxpayer out of it. But they didn't do that - they raided the US treasury instead.

I'm really not sure what to make of that statement. War is inherently a program of socialism, as it's something that's too big to be coordinated piecemeal by market forces. The government is the only entity big enough (except for maybe Wal-Mart) to effectively manage war on the necessary scale. So if we acknowledge that war is a socialized program, why does the author choose to wield the word in that sentence above like a perjorative? I get what the point is. He's basically asserting that privatization is an idea that is supposed to remove bureaucracy from the equation in the interest of exploiting market efficiencies, and that various case studies from this war turn that idea on its head through rampant profiteering. Taxpayers are paying either way, and that we're paying more than we should means that the ideal of privatization is not being met. The idea is still in place (because it's occurring), but profiteering means the purchasing agent is not exploiting market efficiencies, so that makes this somehow socialized provision? Maybe if you want to assume this is done intentionally as an off-book subsidy program for the military-industrial complex, which I guess makes sense to this argument, but the author never goes all the way there.

Let's assume in this argument that the services privatized in this war are necessary to the effective waging of the war. The government can choose to supply that service themselves or to privatize, and have chosen the latter option. Regardless as to the level of profit made by the private supplier, since the service is purchased and not provided by the government, the service is not socialized. So how is it "socialized at a higher price?" That's like saying that the Coke machines in the Pentagon are pseudo-privatized providers of soda pop, as the government could potentially choose to manufacture their own cola beverages and provide at a zero-profit price, but instead allow rampant profiteering by the Coca-Cola Corporation to occur, thereby simply socializing carbonated beverages at a higher price.

Am I missing something else here?

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