Having public services run by private firms a colossal flop - By Dalton Camp

The plague of privatization – and its dark twin’ deregulation – have robbed citizens of their joint properties: railroads, airlines, air terminals, and public space.” 

A friend, standing in line at a railway station washroom in Britain, observed the following sign, erected by management: “Due to service improvement there are reduced toilet facilities on this floor.”

British Rail, once a wholly owned public railway, has been sacrificed to the gods of privatization. Instead of one publicly-owned railway, privatization gave Britons 25 new railways. These, Britons were assured, would provide improved service, healthy competition, lower fares, and further delights.

The result has been chaos. There was an awe-     some decline in the quality of passenger service, frequent delays and cancellations, not to mention the increased danger to life and limb now provided by a public service driven by the lust for private profit.

And profits there are: privatized railroading has proved a gravy train for investors. As for the public, its rewards have been few, arid of course the  government  is  still  shelling  out  millions  of pounds in subsidies for maintenance and other infrastructure costs. The British experience speaks eloquently to the high public cost of free market capitalism.

Consider the illusionary bonanza of deregulation of the airline industry, both in Canada and the United States.  While the public was promised the benefits of “open skies”—which would include more competition, lower fares, and improved service—Canada now has a high-cost, non-competitive industry in which flying has become a luxury. In the United States, where its citizens are raised to believe that patriotism and capitalism are synonyms, air travel has become a health hazard and will also soon become a near-monopoly business. Given the lack of regulation, America’s open skies have become filled with bankrupt airlines and high-altitude mergers.

We could, I suppose, travel by bus. But could we live without electric power? The citizens of California arc in the process of finding out. Four years ago, the California state legislature voted un- anxiously to deregulate its power industry, given  the assurance, in the language of The New York Times, “that market forces would bring power costs down.” ‘This was, The Times added, “a dramatic miscalculation, as it turned out.”

By mid-winter, California’s two largest private utilities were “sliding into bankruptcy.”  Responding to the crisis, the government of the state, proclaiming deregulation a failure, promised, in The Times’ description, “to reassert the state’s control over its power market.” This would include steps to control power plants, grids, arid prices. Privatizes and free market proponents complained of these developments, but most Californians likely thought it was better than sitting in the dark.

The plague of privatization has robbed citizens of their joint properties: railroads, airlines, air terminals, “the King’s highways” and public space. And as its dark twin, deregulation, brings only misery to the general population, someone might think to ask if there is any mechanism or method of accountability somewhere.

John Locke put it very simply: Members of the society authorize others to act for them “to make laws...as the public good of the society shall require.” But now we have legislators who make laws only as the private good may require. 

All this may have been more tolerable were it not for the fact that so much was done in the name of a dubious philosophy, part of which argued that government could not serve the pubic interest nearly as well as could private interests.

If we have learned anything out of all this misadvenhire, inconvenience and risky business, it is that it just ain’t so.

(Dalton Camp is a political commentator and columnist for The Toronto Star, where this piece was first published.)

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