There was a funny moment, several years back, when Jeremy Corbyn was campaigning for leadership of the U.K. Labour party. He suggested that the British state should nationalize the “Big Six” corporations responsible for energy supply in the country, but also that it should consider reopening the coal mines and getting back into the business of deep pit mining. The response from the left ranged from horrified to unenthusiastic, and so Corbyn quickly dropped the idea.
Anyone old enough to remember the 1980s could see what Corbyn was thinking – what he really wanted was to relitigate the miner’s strike, to reverse one of Margaret Thatcher’s most high-profile victories. The fact that pretty much everyone on the left preferred to let bygone be bygones was hardly surprising, but it did carry an important subtext. The fact that no one wanted to renationalize the coal industry, or reopen the mines, constituted a tacit concession that Thatcher was right, at least about this one issue.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m about as far from being a Margaret Thatcher fan as one can find. Many of the privatizations that she carried out were extremely foolish (often based on a simple failure to grasp the importance of competition for ensuring acceptable outcomes from the private sector). Privatization of the water supply is a case in point. At the same time, only a true fanatic would deny that Thatcher was right about some things. After all, it’s not as though the British state circa 1978 was a paragon of either efficiency or social justice.
The same can be said for Canada. Since 1989, when the privatization of Air Canada was finally complete, I have literally never heard a single person lament the passing of the good old days, when it was a public utility. People still love to hate Air Canada, but no one thinks we’d be better off with the government running it. Thus the popular narrative, according to which everything was going great until neoliberalism came along, is a classic example of the reactionary mind (in Mark Lilla’s sense of the term) at work.
For this and other reasons, it seems to me clear that any reasonable person will inevitably be drawn to develop a nuanced view of the wave of privatizations that occurred in Western welfare states, starting in the 1980s. Some were good, some were bad, many were in between. (Also, some have been preserved, some have been reversed, for reasons not unrelated to how well they worked out. There is an interesting little story in Rory Stewart’s recent memoir about the U.K. Conservative government of Theresa May quietly reversing an earlier prison privatization.)
Unfortunately, not all of my colleagues in political philosophy have arrived at the same conclusion. Over the past few years, there have been a number of pieces published on the subject of privatization, which develop what I am inclined to describe as “industrial strength” Kantian or egalitarian arguments against the practice. Typically, the goal is to show that privatization is “intrinsically” wrong, even if it happens to generate better consequences in some dimension.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about these arguments. On the one hand, I think they are valid when applied to a very small number of cases (what I describe as “core” operations of the state). On the other hand, I think that they are either useless or unhelpful for deciding any of the cases that have figured prominently in many of the publicly controversial privatizations. Furthermore, they are excessively rigid, in a way that risks preventing the state from adopting the most efficient organizational form in its own operations.
A concrete example of this would be the debate that occurred in Canada several years ago over private MRI facilities. Most Canadians don’t realize that what we call “socialized medicine” in this country is actually just “socialized health insurance.” We all get health insurance from the government, but most health care is provided by the private sector. (This is different from the U.K., where NHS hospitals are actually owned by the state. In Canada hospitals are private, independently managed non-profits.) Despite this fact, a huge controversy broke out when some radiologists started buying MRI machines and setting up clinics outside the hospitals. Critics treated this as an objectionable form of “privatization,” based on the confused conviction that providing a public service requires that everything be owned by the government. And yet, as long as every citizen has access, paid for by public insurance, what does it matter who owns the machines? Despite this, the government of Ontario wound up spending over $30 million “repatriating” these machines, an expenditure that did nothing to reduce wait-times for diagnostic services.
The point of this story is to show that ideological confusion over “privatization” can generate real costs for society (as well as impair the efficiency of the state sector). So with that in mind, I set out to write an article clarifying some of the main points. Since most philosophers have been focusing in recent years on the most objectionable forms of privatization, I decided to take the opposite tack and describe the least objectionable forms of privatization (or what I refer to as “anodyne privatizations”), with the goal of forcing everyone to recognize the need to adopt a nuanced position.
I am pleased to report that the article was recently published, in the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. More importantly, it was turned into a great symposium after Chiara Cordelli, Savriël Dillingh, Rutger Claassen and Martin O’Neill each contributed a lengthy response. None of the responses, I should note, are at all predictable, and so the discussion is interesting throughout. On top of that, it’s open access, so I would encourage anyone with an interest in the subject to check it out.