Problems of Privatization

The privatization of social services is a perennial concern. In the nineties privatizing the educational system was a hot topic. School vouchers were often discussed. This has since come to be a back burner topic, but privatization is an extremely leading issue. The consulation for it is that businesses are less inefficient than government, and that capitalist competition creates more freedom of option than a singular government program. In the eyes of many, government simply can't do anyone right and should be relied on for as exiguous as possible. This is commonly rooted in Milton Friedman's economic theory, which is the basis for the theories Reagonomics that are still very beloved today, especially on the right. The arguments against privatization are that private businesses are not implicated with the social good and riposte not to the voting social but to shareholders and behalf motive, and that businesses (with the irregularity of "too big to fail" megacorporations) are susceptible to market fluctuations in a way that government programs are not. The way business works, not all businesses can succeed. The risk of failure is essential to fair competition. Early in this century the idea of privatized social services took a hit as a ensue of the California vigor accident of 2000-01 during which partial deregulation and market manipulation by Enron and others led to numerous blackouts and rolling blackouts over the state. It has since come to be less beloved vis a vis social services and infrastructure.

But while the contracting of social infrastructure has not been as hot a topic since then, the contracting of social service to private commerce now thrives in the military and intelligence sectors. In the manufacturing sector this has been going on for decades, though up-to-date developments are indicative of a shift in U.S. Military, economic and political strategies. The majority of defense contracting involves the produce of aircraft and weaponry. Companies like Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, and normal Dynamics (General Electric) receive billions of dollars of tax money per year for the investigate and development and yield of military technology. The military technology that they sell to the branch of Defense is often sold to countries all over the world for the purposes of generating revenue. However, this also causes a worldwide escalation in military production. This is aggravated by the fact that the sales of technology often include possession data and patent permissions so that once a nation buys a technology it can reproduce it. But as much income as this may generate, the research, development and yield of such technologies is often extremely high-priced and inefficient, and the pentagon will sometimes pay billions of dollars for weapons that don't even get made.

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Most citizen in Washington understand that this is a problem, but there is no simple explication to the qoute because: A) private military manufacturers have an extremely grand lobby and B) private military manufacturers employ a great whole of constituents. This often leads congressmen to vote in favor of the yield of weapons that they know are unnecessary because these weapons will be manufactured in their districts and furnish employment for citizen and thus stimulate the local economy. This has led to a complex and problematic situation where the U.S. branch of Defense now finds itself severely overextended and in need of cutbacks in order to avoid bankruptcy. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently announced a plan to cut the money spent on private military contractors by ten percent in the next ten years. This will most likely hurt small businesses the most, as large Companies who lose business from the government and have to cut back will probably first cut the small Companies that they subcontract to out of their allocation and do the work in-house. None of this will do much to solve the very big qoute of the collusion of high level government officials with big business owners and defense contractors. All it will certainly do is keep the branch of Defense from going broke. The U.S. Will still produce more weapons than the 2nd and third biggest producers in the world combined.

While the old military-industrial complex has come to be bloated and will go through a period of essential rollback, there has been a good deal of increase in other sectors, with the government relying more and more on private armies and intelligence contractors as the kind of wars we fight change. In the age of The War on Terrorism, ground military and intelligence personnel have come to be vastly more leading than during the age of warring nations. Fantastic military force a la the philosophy of rapid dominance (popularly known as "shock and awe") is not sufficient in and of itself to fight a war where the combatants are often extremely elusive and often move among the civilian citizen or hide in remote areas like the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. More conventional military tactics come to be ineffective under these conditions.

The benefits of using private armies like Blackwater or private intelligence agencies like Saic are numerous. One of the biggest ones, from the point of view of a nation who wants to win a war but has to riposte to a social that cares about human rights, is that anyone these Companies do in war zones or on spy missions is determined "proprietary information" and need not even be classified by the pentagon because the business has a right to keep it private. This prevents the citizenry from looking out about such things by filing freedom of data Act requests. The irony of this is that it resembles the tactic often used by terrorist organizations and organized crime syndicates of working in cells who deliberately avoid knowing what other cells are doing. This means that Companies can engage in torture tactics in interrogation scenarios and the killing of civilians without having to worry about safe bet restraints that the U.S. Armed military and intelligence agencies are bound by, though of course something so outrageous or safe bet like the Blackwater slaughter in Fallujah in 2007, which led to the Companies downfall, cannot be ignored. However, there is no real system of responsibility in place, so that while Iraqi members of the Blackwater squadron responsible for the killings may be persecuted in Iraq, American employees will not be persecuted in the U.S. Or in any international courts, the authority of which the U.S. Routinely rejects.

Even though Blackwater has fallen, however, other private armies have taken their place. While ostensibly speaking of troop resignation from Iraq, the U.S. Is setting up a private army to stay behind in a new way. According to the 2008 status of military agreement, the U.S. Must withdraw all of its military from Iraq by the end of 2011, but it is leaving behind a large whole of diplomats and a large safety force to protect them. There will be a lot of State branch officials in Iraq, where the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is the size of the Vatican City and has 21 structure on 104 acres. The State dept. Has requested funding for in the middle of 6 and 7 thousand safety contractors (which will not be determined military personnel but members of the State Department's gentle safety division), along with twenty-four Blackhawk helicopters and fifty Mrap's (Mine-Resistant-Ambush-Protected-Vehicles) and other more minor expenditures. A good deal of the contractors employed are third country nationals from other countries. If we outsource our military then the folks at home worry less about our boys getting killed and pay less attentiveness to our operations there. This is a template under which we may control in the future, technically withdrawing all military while still occupying nations, on a smaller scale, "after" wars. While half or more of the citizens at home are convinced that business is good and government bad, the government colludes with big businesses in order to bypass international laws, treaty agreements and constitutional rights. As the U.S.'s opponents in each new epoch of our warring evolve, so do our own tactics. And while it's hard to be sure, it seems like this new age is only just beginning.

Problems of Privatization

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