Ann Hagedorn tackles problems that can come from privatization in her article for The American Prospect as part of its “What the Free Market Can’t Do” series. In “The Perils of Privatization,” Hagedorn uses examples from the United States’ use of private military and security companies in war zones and embassy security to contracting private companies to run U.S. prisons and halfway houses to highlight the horrors that can result from government outsourcing them and weighs them against the cost-savings commonly attributed to that outsourcing.
Ultimately, she concludes that “Privatization, in sum, is effectively a fraud” and “For all the rhetoric about public-private partnerships, our society works better when we keep public functions public and private ones private.”
Read the whole article here.