Mark Kleiman gives some advice to the Democratic presidential candidates with which I disagree:
By the same token, opposition to “corporate interests” went out, or should have gone out, with bell-bottoms. The question of what to do publicly and what to do privately — how much of the GDP should be at the direction of the political system — is an important question, and deeply linked, though not identical, with the question of income redistribution. Those are things worth fighting about.
But the question of how much public work to accomplish by buying it from contractors rather than hiring civil servants is a separate question, and mostly a technical one. The interests of the public employees (and their unions) are not the same as the interests of the public. Yes, contracting-out can be a form of patronage, and whether politically-connected, or merely poorly-supervised, contractors are chiselling the public is always a legitimate issue to raise.
The first part is fine, but in the second part he goes overboard. The question of whether governmental functions should be done by commercial contractors and which services should be contracted out in the first place is of paramount importance to everybody, not just “public employees (and their unions)”.
Whenever a government service is contracted out, issues of accountability, openness and
transparanty come into play. By using contractors, government agencies can circumvent their own regulations and rules, not to mention parliamentary scrutiny. It’s no coincidence that the Bush regime is trying so hard to either contract out various public safety functions (luggage screeners, anyone?) or
strip federal employees of their protections as civil servants. That way troublemakers (whistleblowers) can be fired and don’t need to be listened to. Ignorance is bliss, after all. That certainly seems to be
the reasoning of the Transportation Security Administration, which is already conducting a “Witch hunt” against whistle blowers.
Even if the current administration wasn’t trying to coverup its actions, using private firms harms
accountability. Remember the furore about the electronic voting systems whose inner workings could
not be made public because they were a “trade secret”?
Incidently, I’m a bit miffed by the casual dismissal of the concerns of “civil servants (and their unions)”.
I’m no fan of bureaucracy myself, but that doesn’t mean one should stay sanguine about seeing protected
civil servant jobs disappear or mutate into McJobs, especially when it’s done for nefarious reasons or as a matter of (free market good!) ideology.