Public vs Private Services

One of the more insidious change of the last 30 or 40 years is that our old system of working for a company that provided us a decent living wage, health insurance and a pension has largely disappeared.

Those things got too expensive so we have seen automation ad outsourcing make each of us a free agent.

Few companies offer traditional pensions anymore, health insurance has large deductibles and co-pays and employment is often a tenuous thing as both companies and employees feel little loyalty to each other.

Further we have seen many of our young people saddled with student debt they may never pay off.

This is not the fault of the liberal elite, it is simply the obvious result of capitalist greed.

Those who can profit from us, do.

Instead of providing things like health care, schools and pensions as a public service we have seen the proponents of privatization (and profit) argue that the public sector is too inefficient and that the private sector can do it better.

It can for those who profit from it, not those who have to use it.

This belief that the private sector is more efficient, is simply not true, it is simply better at making some people rich and milking the rest of us.

If it does it cheaper, which it usually doesn't, it is because it cuts services, not because it weeds out inefficiency.

Yes, private industry is in many ways brutal in how it is willing to overwork people and cut jobs but is that really the goal?

Government Role

In many ways the economy is doing well, but in some other ways not so much.

It was always clear from the demographics that we would have a bit of a labor shortage after the baby boomers started to retire and to some extent that is driving the low unemployment.

However, many of them are not prepared for retirement so I guess they are either staying in their current jobs or finding new ones.

We have seen a transition from a manual labor manufacturing model to a more robotic, technical one and that has disrupted a lot of rust belt jobs.  Those jobs aren't coming back even as we add some manufacturing jobs to our lowered base.  Unskilled labor is simply not going to command the wages it once did.  This is in many ways a positive trend for the economy and growth although not for those specific workers.

The issue there is that the profits are being unequally distributed with the displaced workers getting very little transition assistance as we reduce the Government programs that could have helped them.

This uneven distribution of wealth is probably the greatest threat to our country as it attacks the very foundation of our middle class society.

The best way to fix it is via Government programs as in Europe where certain expenses such as health care and pensions are centralized allowing people to have less expenses.

Of course those type of programs are an attack on wealthy people who would be subsidizing the poor.

Should the Government serve as the provider of certain services or not?

We are somewhere in the middle and right now we are saying no, in general.

However, the level of income inequality shows how our current approach is failing, so the times they may be a changing.