More things are fitting together. Conservatives, be careful what you wish for.
Chapter 7 of the Lakoff book, THE POLITICAL MIND, which I passed over in my review, is about what he calls “privateering.”
This is when government services are handed off to private corporations. (As those guys who want to cut the government by $2 trillion would have to do.) The process involves enablers, dismantling acts, privateers themselves, and so on. (Lakoff goes into detail.) The results increase profits for stockholders and executives of those corporations, at the expense of the government’s mission to protect and empower citizens. And, crucial point, the public ends up paying much more for those services.
(Lakoff’s basis, as I didn’t quite spell out in my review, is that progressives, driven by empathy, think the government has a moral mission to provide protection, and empowerment. That that’s what government is for. In contrast to conservatives’ obsession with hierarchy, obedience, and discipline.)
In fact I read about one example a about a year ago (on a plane flight back from Austin), without realizing it was an example of a larger issue. This was in Cory Doctorow’s novel The Bezzle, a contemporary novel about a forensic accountant, a ponzi scheme on Catalina Island, and the privatization of California’s Department of Corrections. The effects of that privatization include making it much more difficult, and expensive, to visit prisoners because, well, the private owners are mostly interested in “how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.” (Per the description on the Amazon page.)
This has really happened. Lakoff provides three other stories, as of the Fall of 2007. First: Blackwater, the private army of mercenaries (called security guards), that fought the Iraq War, charging the US government $445,000 per security guard—who were earlier trained by the government at taxpayer expense. Second, the FDA, whose funding was cut, sending responsibility for drug testing to the pharma companies. Who then fudged many of the results, because, well, profits win out. Third, health care. Health insurance companies make their money by denying health care. (Thus the rage of the guy who murdered that HealthCare CEO a few weeks ago.) Their overhead is far higher than Medicare’s. Americans resist the idea of universal healthcare (as somehow being socialist?) while being fine with police and fire service (that are just as ‘socialist’). Conservatives, who somehow think people don’t “deserve” health care, prefer privateering it. Which, as it happens, makes them more money.
The motivations of government agencies, no matter how inefficient you think they might be, are fundamentally different from the motivations of private organizations. Conservatives seem not to realize that.
Lakoff’s point is that privateering isn’t always bad, but we need to ask whether the moral mission of the government is compromised or not. And what does cognitive science say? That anything can be framed.
Stepping back. What are conservatives primarily concerned about? Small government, and big business. See now how those things fit together? Despite the naivete and cynicism (not skepticism) about what “big government” or the “deep state” actually does, and the inevitable inefficiency that comes with any kind of bureaucracy, I suspect there’s very little that the government does that someone wouldn’t complain about it if weren’t there. So if conservatives blast the government and push to privatize everything, why would that be? Why, because a few of them, at least, will make more money.
So all those conservatives who advocate a small government should be careful what they wish for. If the government shrinks, most of its services will be provided by someone else. Who then? People whose primary motive is profit. And that’s how the rich get richer. And private citizens end up paying more for services that used to be provided by the government.
