This morning Illinois Senator Mark Kirk appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box to advocate new legislation which he claims would remove a dozen restrictions on private-public partnerships. I say “claims” because more often than not, legislation does the opposite of what its sponsors say it will do. I haven’t read the proposed legislation but from his description it sounds like he is advocating a state’s rights approach to infrastructure privatization.
If this legislation really does what he claims, it could be a step closer to true infrastructure privatization.
If you are interested in this stuff, pick up a copy of Walter Block’s brilliant new book The Privatization of Roads and Highways. You can read it here for free – and even print it out if you want – but at under 4 cents a page, it is hard to beat the deal the Mises Store offers on the paperback.
{ 6 comments }
So basically what these partnerships really involve is allowing the firm to be licensed under the state and operate undertaking functions it ordinarily would. For them to constitute true privatisation (or something close to it), the licensing aspect would need to be obviated entirely.
I hate the license and lease schemes as well, but it’s still a step in a better direction.
I like how they’re called public-private though. As if the public sector has any real part in them. It’s appropriately misleading to make people think it implies the public sector’s “doing” something other than stepping the hell out of the way as it should.
Less than 4c a page? That’s cheaper than printing it at home!
I always get incredibly nervous whenever they talk about “partnerships” between the sectors. It usually only means that the public sector gets bigger and the private sector gets… muddy.
Who will the current (union?) employees report to – private or public? Who provides wages and benefits and do they get a waiver from Obamacare? Can the be fired? And that’s just the HR aspect. I’d like to see a list of the gov’t mandates that are attached to this ‘deal’. What recourse does the private entity have if the government renegs on an agreement, unless it’s a crony? This is, after all, Illinois.
Comments on this entry are closed.