November 21, 2007 at 07:25:19

Privatized Hell Revisited

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By Ernest Partridge (about the author) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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Community pre-planning and preparation are also essential to disaster management. For example, last month, in the "Grass Valley" fire near my home, the mansions of the "have mores" at Lake Arrowhead were protected by the removal of a million dead and diseased trees by order of the "big government" U.S. Forest Service, and by the local government requirement that flammable brush be removed from the modest homes of the "proletariat." Cooperative community action combined with a large-scale coordinated response by professional fire-fighters saved the day, as the fire was contained to 1200 acres and the loss of about two hundred out of ten thousand homes.. (See "The California Wildfires and Right Wing Smoke").

In contrast, a private fire crew, "contracted" to save this particular house at 1234 My Castle Circle (not 1232 and not 1236), has no "big picture" in mind. The total concern of the crew is this house, and this house only.

Clearly, it's a helluva way to fight a fire.

Privatized fire fighting is immoral. The determined regressive might reply that the neighborhood could avoid the "this house but not that house" problem by agreeing to hire a single private fire fighting company. (However, there would remain the "this neighborhood but not that neighborhood" problem. But let that pass). All members of the neighborhood would then be required to pay a fee to the company "required," because those who might otherwise not pay would nonetheless be at least partially protected by the fee-payers, i.e., they would be "free riders." Hence a "coercion" (and implied "theft of property") detested by Ayn Rand and the libertarians.

But this scheme puts the "regressive" neighborhood perilously close to installing a public fire department. What's in a name? Call the neighborhood a "town," the fee "taxes," and the fire company a "fire department," and what is the practical difference?

There is this difference: because of the high fees (due to the inefficiency problem, above) the neighborhood described here would have to be comprised of very wealthy home owners. And having paid exorbitant fees for individual fire protection, they would not be inclined to pay taxes to support city, county and state fire fighting agencies. In fact, San Diego County was ill-prepared for the fires of last month, due to successful tax-cutting proposals by anti-tax, anti-government conservative Republicans.

Accordingly, a privatization of fire protection, along with other emergency management services, increases and solidifies the stratification of society into the "have-nots" and "the have-mores." "I have mine you're on your own." The community then encompasses the neighborhood, but no more. Beyond the neighborhood is another country. Gone is the civic friendship that binds a nation together the "equal justice under law," the shared covenant enshrined in the founding documents of the republic, the sense that the national economy is a cooperative venture comprised of indispensable components: workers, investors, managers, and government.

Instead, we have George Bush's "ownership society," wherein today the wealthiest one percent of the population owns more than the bottom ninety percent, and that "ownership" of the oligarchs is increasing. (See "Facts on the Concentration of Wealth"). Included in that one-percent of the country effectively "owned" by the "have-mores" are privatized fire and other emergency services, the media, the courts, private armies, the paperless touch-screen machines that count our votes and the secret software that compiles election returns, and, finally, via lobbyists and campaign contributions, the Congress of the United States.

This concentration of wealth and this privatization of essential public services and government functions are both symptoms and causes of a failing democracy and a disintegrating nation.

Our history, our laws, and our shared sense of justice all warn us of this.

It remains to be seen whether we the people of the United States, the "proletariat" 90%, have the collective power and resolution to reverse this slippery slide toward despotism.

Copyright 2007 by Ernest Partridge

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Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. Partridge has taught philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website, (more...)

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