I am becoming ever less enamored of the profit motivation, and would like to see it severely restricted.
I understand that it plays a positive role in SOME economic endeavors, and thus CAN lead to new and better products, but those who are already profiting will often be ruthless against any competition that might reduce their profits.
There are some areas of American life that imho simply should not be subject to the profit motivation the way they increasingly are
- the products/services produced tend to cost more and/or the people who labor to produce them are paid less
- the "profits" generated somehow get taxed at a lower level than the wages paid those whose labor produces them
- the products/services are often of a lesser quality because the quality is of lesser importance than the profit
- the attempts to obtain guaranteed revenue streams to generate the profits corrupts our political process
- in the case of many weapons systems, the motivation for profit leads to wider distribution of those systems, inappropriate civilian use of the systems, and greater violence around the world.
As professional teacher, increasingly turning our education over to for-profit entities is destructive of learning and is of course of great concern. But that is far from my only concern.
You can expect that I will discuss education. Let me address some other issues.
First, when a function is done by the government at any level, those people affected by it at least nominally have the protection of the Bill of Rights, which while written to protect against Federal government actions have been extended through the 14th Amendment to protection against any level of government.
A local government has restrictions placed upon it that, for example, do not apply to a neighborhood/civic/condominium association, which could be set up by a development company not so much as a means for collective action by the residents/owners as it is a means of protecting that development company from any such collective action. The argument is that one is voluntarily joining the association and therefore must abide by its rules (so long as those rules are in compliance with relevant federal, state and local statutes regulating them). But if the board of the association is captive by the development - or management - company, one loses essential elements of self-governance, to wit, the ability to change those roles.
This can affect/limit one's freedom of behavior and it certainly restricts how one can use one's property. Most people tend not to complain, and this may seem like a minor issue, but it is symptomatic.
Of far greater importance is private ownership of essential services. In the past, companies that provided essential services were strictly regulated on the grounds that they tended to be natural monopolies - thus companies providing electricity, gas, phone, cable tv, or in some cases water had to demonstrate to a commission the rates they were going to charge were relevant to reasonable costs, allowing them a guaranteed and consistent, but not necessarily large, profit. Nowadays while the wires coming to your house might be owned by a local electric company, the electricity can be bought competitively, so electric companies are seeking less regulation. Similarly with gas companies. i acknowledge that there are still some electric cooperatives, owned by their customers, although in most metropolitan areas they play at best a minor role. A cooperative does not have shareholders to satisfy, only customers, so in theory the money we pay is not partially diverted to those who invest and who wish a return on that investment.
For many communities water was a municipal and/or regional service. it was provided by the government. Around the world multinational companies have sought to purchase water systems. This potentially gives them a stranglehold on an essential for life. If nothing else, that should represent some level of concern. Then there is the question of who actually owns the water being provided - much of the West has long-negotiated agreements over water rights, because absent good access to water life there is at best tenuous. One might argue that the issue of pollution of streams and aquifers by other forms of industry (including agriculture just as much as energy) might be better contexted by for-profit organizations whose own profits are thereby put at risk, but then why should a private organization be able to claim ownership of a resource that when they draw upon it does not come exclusively from the land on which they operate, either by outright ownership or having obtained the relevant water rights? After all, our aquifers often cross many state boundaries, perhaps stretching as far as from Texas to the Dakotas.
I have watched with horror the development of a private incarceration system in this country. One might argue that things like food service or laundry or trash collection can be done less expensively by companies that specialize in such services because they will not only have the expertise, but also can save taxpayers by economies of scale. Whether or not that is true, that is far different than having guards with control over the lives of those sentenced by Public courts of law whose operations are run by for-profit organizations. Their abuse of prisoners is not as tightly regulated as would be prison guards employed by the state. Outright ownership of a prison seems to me antithetical to the notion of a democracy. Granted, we have a long tradition in this country of private entities being able to hire prison or jail workers at a labor cost that cannot be matched by organizations hiring from the general population. Such a practice has as could be expected a concomitant history of abuse.
If a prison is a for-profit entity, those running it have strong motivation to want to see their cells filled. This will inevitably lead to the kind of corruption we have already seen - where a judge, now sentenced to several decades of incarceration, was effectively selling the incarceration of accused appearing before him to a private, for-profit, detention center. We have similarly seen in the case of Corrections Corporation of America extensive lobbying of laws resulting in more prisoners needing to be housed, as we have seen for example with Arizona's approach to undocumented aliens.
If the prison can be privatized, what is next? Private security is already rampant. Might a city abolish its police or fire departments and turn those services over to for-profit entities? Have we not in the case of fire already seen cases where when those services are provided by "volunteer" organizations a refusal to respond to fires at locations where membership or support is not already covered by a contract? We already have many locations where policing power is exercised by contract services. It is one thing for a private entity to have its own paid security with the right to detain those on its property who they accuse of theft, trespassing, assault, or other offenses. But they should be required to IMMEDIATELY turn custody of such accused over to PUBLIC authorities. Were a random person to pull a gun on you and refuse to let you leave a location, that person might well be in violation of statutes on kidnapping and false imprisonment. We would hope that a policeman at any level has SOME level of training both in appropriate use of force and in the laws and constitutional provisions designed to protect us. That person supposedly has a sworn duty - which is supposed to be to the public good. A private security dealer does not. When we begin to turn over such responsibilities to private, for-profit entities, does not the profit motivation begin to outweigh concerns? Have not we already seen this in the use of private armed security services to provide "protection" and "security" for government buildings and installation of various kinds, and in Iraq to provide same for the likes of Paul Bremer and other high-ranking officials?
If the enforcing of law and the incarceration of convicted can be privatized, cannot one see a progression to privatizing of the legal functions - for profit organizations providing courtrooms, then prosecutors, then judges. Before you respond that defense attorneys are privatized, we have long recognized that a completely privatized defense bar leads to legal inequity and injustice, which in theory is why we have things like public defenders and requirements of lawyers to provide pro bono services for those who cannot afford them. Even that has been (a) insufficient, and (b) is constantly under attack.
The two areas that are most bothersome to me are medicine and education.
The greater the emphasis on profit, the less equitable are the access to both, and to the services people receive.
Too much of the money we spent on medicine goes to purposes other than providing medical care broadly defined. It goes to profits of investors and managers of corporations who run hospitals, it goes to profits of investors and managers of corporations that insure us so that we are not destroyed by the catastrophe of a serious illness or injury. In the process we as a society become less healthy - too many people STILL lack basic care, and in a sense that puts the rest of us at risk as well.
As for education? I acknowledge that it has always been somewhat inequitable. Because we fund large portions of it through local taxes that come primarily from the value of real estate and state taxes that come from income and sales taxes, those communities that are wealthier have been able to provide better educational opportunities for their offspring. The very wealthy have the advantage of being able to pay for private educational settings where the environment is very different than what most public institutions have been able to provide.
I said most public institutions. I came from a superb public school system, in Mamaroneck NY, where several weekends ago I returned for my 50th high school reunion. I want to note two experiences which told me how good we were, even as many of those with whom I had gone to school through 8th grades went elsewhere beginning in 9th, if Catholic boys to the Jesuit schools (Fordham and Fairfield Preps) and if the families had money and connection the boys to Horace Mann or Andover and the girls to Emma Willard and Miss Porter's.
I had several experiences of being able to compare the quality of good public education versus elite private schools.
The first came junior year, when I attended for the first time the East Coast Model United Nations Conference, something I did again as a senior. The schools participating were a mix of public and private schools, and on both occasions the events were held up public schools, in Montclair NJ and Wilmington DE (I do not remember which was which). One could not tell from listening to the students who participated which came from public schools and which from private schools. My first year, the two most articulate presentations were by people from very elite Choate and from Scarsdale NY (a very wealthy district). My 2nd year there were three people on our committee who clearly were a cut above - from Birch Wathen (a private school in NYC), from a public school in Brooklyn, and from Mamaroneck (yours truly, who because the host school had failed to provide someone to preside, did dual duty of presiding, but also temporarily step aside to give a stem-winding speech that totally moved the committee).
Ironically, the young man from the private school was in my freshman class at Haverford College that fall,and has since become one of the most eminent men in his field.
Haverford College was the 2nd place I had the opportunity to compare. As I recall well over half of my classmates were like me, from public schools. The only two National Merit Scholars were from adjacent communities, a young man from New Rochelle High School who later was an important figure both in the Foreign Service and at the US Institute of Peace, and again yours truly. Our class president freshman year was from a public school in Arlington VA. Leadership positions on athletic teams and student organizations were distributed among the classmates roughly proportionally to the percentages of public and private school graduates.
From those experiences I felt that in general, those of us who came from well resourced public schools were getting as good an education as those whose parents were paying for elite private schools.
There were some differences - clearly those in the private schools has smaller class sizes, and a better chance of personal attention from their teachers. But my AP US History class had only 13 senior year, and we went to places like Princeton, Haverford, Harvard, MIT Cornell, etc. Clearly we were not handicapped by our public school education.
The topic of this reflection is about profit. Nowadays this is very applicable to education even in what is supposed to be public education. We are seeing the shift of resources from the kinds of instruction I received to testing companies, test prep materials, charter school management, etc. We see major players in education (Bill Gates) arguing that we do not need experienced teachers (he has said teachers do not improve after about 3 years, when in fact most don't reach their stride before their 3rd year) and that advanced education certainly in not worth paying higher salaries (although in the Mamaroneck school system around half the teachers with five or more years experience had Masters degrees, many from Teachers College Columbia U). While one can argue about both experience and relevant education, what was clearly that half century ago and earlier is that a much greater percentage was being spent on instructional purposes than today, in part because there was proportionally less spent on testing and test preparation, and upon administration. I happen to think that the emphasis we have seen on testing has been because there are those who profit therefrom, and even the supposedly non-profit organizations involved in testing pay their executives as if they were in the private sector. It is not clear to me how this has benefited students, if in fact it has.
Now I come to the most difficult part of this - what should be my reaction, how should I live my life given my displeasure with the impact of the profit motivation?
I teach in public schools, for less money than I could make working in the private sector. That was not a new thing when I left data processing to become a teacher, because I had for well over half a decade worked for local government instead of for organizations that were geared towards making a profit.
I am not opposed to profits per se. After all, I patronize a number of local institutions and a few chains that are for-profit. I prefer where possible those rooted in my local community, so that my spending in some way supports my community. This includes the wages of employees, and the taxes paid to the local government. I have found that in general employees of such local enterprises tend to be treated better, or the enterprise would not, in a liberal community like Arlington, survive. It may mean I do not shop at the place which offers the lowest nominal prices because my spending does less to support my local community.
Certainly in a civil society there should be some things that function as public services, that do not have as their sole or primary motivation the maximization of profits for those who own and operate them.
I have no problem with a retail establishment of any sort being for-profit: that includes my dry-cleaners, the various places at which I buy gas, the dealership from which I purchase and at which I receive service for our motor vehicles, the restaurants we patronize, etc.
I understand that many of the utilities I require are for-profit entities, although in Virginia these tend to be heavily regulated (because originally they were natural monopolies). My water and sewer are provided by the local government, and waste/refuse/recycling is through the local government, although some routes are competitively bid.
Recognizing that we will have many areas of our lives in which we will have to depend upon enterprises and organizations that are for profit, I would that even these would not be able to operate solely on the basis of maximizing profits at the expense of other things
- paying and providing benefits for employees so that those employees can have decent lives
- paying a fair share of taxes for the services provided that enable them to function
- being restricted from developing monopoly positions that allow them to extort the rest of us with no additional benefit received by us
In short, I am not a capitalist, nor do I believe that a free market system is always the most appropriate way for key parts of the economy and the society.
One additional factor if I may - in no way should one's political power be proportional to the amount of money one has, because that totally distorts the political process in a way that cannot but increase economic inequity. Unless and until we as a society understand and accept this, too many Americans will find their lives limited and restricted as what they need is sacrificed for greed in the unrestrained pursuit of the maximization of profits.