Private vs. Public

April 30, 2002

When the Blue Chips Are Down, in Gov We Trust is an essay in the Washington Post that does challenges the notion that corporations do things cheaper and more efficiently than governments can. The party line is that the “miracle of the marketplace” encourages and rewards efficency and innovation. Paul Farhi sees it otherwise.

What Paul does not explain is why this is so. Let me elaborate. Our corporations have turned into big, hulking, slow, bloated bureaucracies because *our* free market system does not reward efficiency and innovation. It rewards mergers and lawsuits. Many of our essential services are now provided by monopolies or regional monopolies. Efficency and innovation are encouraged by free-market forces only when there’s a competitive reason for them.

Thanks to nearly twenty years of leaving the market alone, we now get our electricity from a monopoly, our phone service from a monopoly, our cable from a monopoly. Mainstream media is owned by Disney, Fox, or Time Warner. There are few choices and little competition.

It’s time for some more trust busting, ladies and gentlemen. Time for more trust busting.

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