I’ve been thinking a long time about the privatization of public services and some of the inherent dangers that go along with such schemes. I would not say that I am anti-privatization in all cases (I suppose I can imagine some scenarios where turning over a government service to a private company might make sense), but there is one entire class of services that it seems obvious to me the government should never privatize – and yet it does. It is the class of services I call “Necessary Evils.”
“Necessary Evils” are the services a society needs that – in an ideal world – it would never wish to have. Things that we have to do that we wish we didn’t. Two obvious examples of such Necessary Evils are (i) our prison system, and (ii) our military. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t be locking people up because we wouldn’t need to lock people up. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have a military because we wouldn’t need to have a military.
But we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world that contains some dangerous people, and both for the sake of punishment (we gave up a long time ago on rehabilitation in this country; about the time Ronald Reagan was elected, we committed ourselves to an Old Testament – not a New Testament – approach to crime) and for the sake of public safety some people must be locked away.
And we live in a world that requires (although a whole lot less, in my opinion, than our political leaders seem to think) that we be able to defend ourselves militarily. So we have to have a military.
But when we privatize these government services we attach a profit motive to the provision of these services. In other words, we create circumstances that argue in favor of locking up more people or argue in favor of more military action (here, I'm thinking about outfits like Blackwater). We create conditions that further the promotion of Necessary Evils and – sometimes – just plain Evil, no qualifier required.
