The 20th Anniversary Edition of the Reason Foundation’s annual global privatisation report by Robert Poole and other scholars chronicles the sweeping economic changes in Great Britain and the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and more recently in China and the former communist nations of Eastern Europe, says the Wall Street Journal.
Although the United States never went as far down the socialist path as China or Eastern Europe, privatisation has yielded gains here:
But the biggest U.S. revolution, says Reason, has been at the state and local level. Cities have learned to cut costs by shifting operations to the private sector:
However, both in the United States and abroad, there is still much more privatisation that could be done, particularly in vital areas like education. The steady erosion of productivity and lack of advancement of charter schools, vouchers and private scholarship programmes has been much too slow for the well-being of Americas poorest children.
Looking forward, says Reason, entrenched interests, such as unions and public employees that intimidate politicians into opposing competition will continue to be privatisation’s biggest obstacle. Building a political strategy to overcome this opposition is one of the main challenges of our time.
Source: Editorial, Socialism in Reverse, The Wall Street Journal, July 29 2006
For text (subscription required): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115412585898220871-search.html
For report: http://www.reason.org/apr2006/apr2006.pdf
For more on Privatization Issues: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=37
FMF Policy Bulletin/ 08 August 2006
