Nationalised institutions and public services serve people. Private institutions might aim to do so too, but with the caveat that they must also make money for the corporations that own them. In practice, the requirement for profit means privatised entities do not serve the people at all. When the evidence for this is all around us – think sewage, rail, bus services, the rapidly privatising NHS – how are the people convinced to allow public goods to be sold off?
The old Chomsky two-step . . .
Noam Chomsky explained some years ago that a common strategy for the privatisation of national institutions is to defund them. When they subsequently begin to fail, a government can point to the failure, act as if the defunding never happened, and claim that the industry or service would work better in private hands. Business, they say, has the financial incentive to create greater efficiency where governments – look! – only fail. This is transparent (and wrong) enough, but it is actually just a part of the strategy.
. . . and the tax-cut con
Tax cuts for the wealthy go hand-in-hand with defunding. They help to create ideological and legislative plausibility for the privatisation process. Tax cuts are sold as relief for the less fortunate but, in reality, benefit the wealthier members of society far more substantially. Then, once that part of the manoeuvre has been executed, budget reductions can come in on the pretext that less tax revenue is being generated to fund national institutions and programs.
This deception, what we might call el engaño de la privatisación, is designed to move responsibility away from the collective and towards corporations in already private industries, sometimes embodied by particular wealthy individuals. The process is not, as it claims to be, a collection of good-faith legislative innovations, but simply the executed steps of a larger plan. That plan is intended to create a more libertarian social climate in sectors of existence where it is not beneficial – such as healthcare, news, the post, education, and so on.
The value of public goods
Everyone in a society benefits across their lifetime, in material and personal terms, from greater access to healthcare, reliable news sources, inexpensive means for sending letters and parcels, good and positive educational facilities and educators, and countless other examples of public goods and services which, with the best will in the world, could never be run on a profitable basis.
Conservatives in both the United Kingdom and the United States, however, often seem to ignore these objectively true ideas in lieu of a dream in which all people should live as they did prior to civil and social innovations. They would prefer the Georgian, Dickensian or Victorian era – the romantic 19th century of conquest, the Wild West, rugged individualism, new frontiers, and inordinate suffering. They move to defund national institutions with one hand, going on about the costs and ineffectual nature of systems run by the government, while trying to lower taxes that can be used to fund national institutions with the other.
In other words, they look to disassemble fundamental, beneficial aspects of society while claiming that doing so is fiscally responsible behaviour. They defund a given program – Sure Start for example – arguing that it does not adequately serve the community. But as a result, that program will either serve the community more poorly, or cease to exist altogether.
Making a bad thing sound good
Tax cuts and the rhetoric around them serve a pernicious purpose here. Governments brag to working people about tax cuts, despite the fact those very people are the ones who benefit least from cuts and are most likely to be harmed by lost services. Then the lower tax environment is used as an excuse for further defunding, often with false comparisons to household budgets.
It is against this background that private businesses with profiteering ambitions are touted as the answer to our problems. The public approach has failed and the coffers are empty, they tell us, but now the private sector is here to save us.
And they will, to an extent, and for a price that will cost individuals out of their pockets over the course of a lifetime far more than they would have paid collectively through individual and corporate taxation. Privatisation is also economically regressive in that price and cost increases will siphon greater percentages of income from the poor and the middle class than from the wealthy.
Worse, over time, access to the goods and services that are privatised increasingly becomes the exclusive domain of the wealthy – think of clean water in Flint, Michigan, timely travel between cities in the UK, or even, in 2020s Britain, adequate shelter for children.
The questionable ideology of self
The privatisation of society might seem a smart idea when framed in a certain light – a largely selfish, self-serving and capital-engrossed one – but humans are undoubtedly stronger and more capable in greater collectives than in smaller groups or alone. While that is a key motivation for people to gather in communities, there is another important reason why we do it. Not only is humanity safest in this world when surrounded by humanity, but humans generally enjoy being around other humans, too.
Why then would a society want to dismantle those gains it has made for the great breadth of all the people, to create greater financial advantage for a few? Why do that at the expense, for the vast majority, of good, positive and reliable public goods and services? For money? Living in a society means caring for one another, paying for one another, and thinking of one another. These tenets are more important than turning a profit, surely?
The tax-cut-to-privatisation pipeline, just like the method of defunding institutions, relies heavily on a logic that identifies all services as capital – not civil – activities. All services, so this argument goes, can and should be monetised for individual or minor collective gain at the expense of the majority of the people, even when those services would actually benefit the entire polity, rich and poor, were they publicly available and practically – not theoretically – accessible to all.
A society, in this sense, is whatever an individual can afford it to be for them, instead of what the collective mass of the community, state, nation or planet can afford for one another, acting together.
Society or barbarism?
But this obsessively privatised notion of society is no real society at all. It is a jungle of concrete, metal, and plastic where personal gain and ambition are the only meaningful cares in the world, and where those that have naught deserve just what they have, and no more. It is a world where people treat people like animals yet call themselves civilised beyond historical comparison.
To cut taxes for the wealthy while defunding national institutions – therefore pushing with both hands the needs of the many into the pockets and wallets of oligarchs and multinational corporations – is selfish cynicism aimed at the people themselves. The people, however, once they understand what is being done to them, don’t take too kindly to being attacked. Do they?
