Date: Sun, 22 Feb 1998 14:18:35 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-I: State of the World


James Heartfield wrote:

>Your quote seems to say that public services are always better than
>private ones. But that is a false comparison. Public services as they
>exist are generally pretty awful. The choice between the capitalist
>state and the market is hobson's choice. Don't believe all that hype
>about the National Health service - not unless you think that it is a
>good idea to wait 18 months for a simple operation. The simple fact is
>that Britain's telephone system was a lot worse when it was a public
>utility - complete with six month waiting lists to get connected. If
>socialism is the same thing as nationalisation on the British model then
>you can keep it.

This seems trivially obvious to me. So what's your point? Embrace the
privatized BT as a model? Privatize the NHS, rather than fund it at a
civilized level? (British health care spending was 6.9% of GDP in 1995,
compared with 9.6% in Canada, 9.8% in France, 10.4% in Germany - and an
absurd 14.2% in the U.S., world capital of privatized healthcare.) My quote
doesn't seem to say that "public services are always better than private
ones"; what it says is that the failures of private provision result in
private solutions to what are essentially public problems, and private
solutions to public problems only make things worse in the long run.

Doug





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