But still, the basic economic questions are the same, here and there. That's why in Atlanta and Detroit, as well as so many third world cities, the popular attack on the corporatisation of basic services has such good resonance -- across the national boundaries, the race/gender lines, the sectors of workers, the poor, the enviros, the health activists and so on.
This rhetoric just below reflects your proximity to 18th and H Sts, right?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Max B. Sawicky" <sawicky at bellatlantic.net>
> To support or debunk the idea, you need some notion of
> justifiable criteria for contracting or not contracting...
> Public production of services does not necessarily lead
> to more equitable distribution, to more cost-efficient
> production, to more regard for the environment, to
> a better deal for the workers, etc.
Ok, a) no one says the public sector intrinsically serves the masses. Here in Jo'burg, we all read Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Ch.3 on Pitfalls of National Consciousness, and we have no problem applying it across Africa. As I wrote to Doug last month when he was groaning about the nation-state as a target, all the big grassroots struggles here insist on a better state, and refuse the neoliberalisation, commodification and decentralisation processes. And having such ghastly states actually makes our independent-left cadres much better revolutionaries, in part because they instinctively eschew micro-managerialism (though that's what my public policy school is ultimately all about, I have to admit).
But b) to get to micro-managerialism then, the 'cost-efficient production' favoured by private suppliers is notorious for ignoring externalities and cherrypicking out the poor (who are inefficient to serve because of the falling short-run marginal cost curve of water and similar state services). In the former category you've got public and merit goods like gender equity, mitigation of public health problems (43,000 kids die of diarrhoea here each year because of lack of clean water), economic multipliers, environmental protection and even residential geographical desegregation. None of those gives your Paris/London water company shareholders any added return on equity, so they ignore them, leading to the widespread cherrypicking problem.
In any case, c) all this municipal infrastructure is typically a natural monopoly and also a lumpy investment, which in practice deters both consumer capture of efficiencies and new capital inflows, the alleged benefits of privatisation. And you want to try to get some regulatory capacity in our states going to enforce access or enviro laws? Forget it around here: captive regulation was invented by SA corporations long before Kolko discovered it in the Progressive Era.
So join us, comrade, don't slide down that slippery thinktank slope of moderation that tempts so many inside that damned beltway.
Cheers, P.