At its beginning, the ruling powers in Great Britain embarked on one of the most sustained efforts to destroy community life ever undertaken.
From 1770 to 1830 some 3,280 enclosure bills were passed putting into private hands for private gain more than six million acres of commonly-held lands. By 1830 not a single country had more than three percent of its land open to public use. According to historian George Stuart:
“To the enclosure of the commons more than to any other cause, may be traced all the changes which have subsequently passed over the village. it was like knocking the keystone out of an arch.”
– Derek Wilson
Mother Jones magazine published an article a year or two ago titledd “The Highwaymen,” which gave a good overview of the increasingly success corporations were enjoying in achieving control of existing public transportation infrastructure, or convincing U.S. states to give them a concessions of 50 to 75 years to operate new facilities that they proposed to build.
The Reagan Republicans may have succeeded in implanting the stereotype of the “welfare queen” riding around in her Cadillac, spending her monthly allotment of tax dollars extracted from their pockets, a sum probably exceeding their take-home pay, with wanton abandon on drugs, liquor, and entertaining her numerous baby-daddies; but apparently there are limits to the people’s gullibility.
Because the pitchmen’s best efforts to drum up if not enthusiastic public support, then at least docile acceptance of one of these euphemistically termed “public-private partnerships” has been successful.
When you tell a working class guy that he’s going to have to pay a toll to get to work, and admit that the cost may go up over time, the portion of Joe Sixpack’s brain devoted to an intuitive understanding of and agreement with voodoo-based social science principles such as supply side economics, the inherent desirability of private solutions over public answers to economic problems, and that holy of holies the market as the font of all original truth, justice, and wisdom dries up like a raisin and shuts down.
They never like the idea; referendums to approve proposals fail miserably and if you ask people what they think about the idea they don’t politely offer an attempt at a balanced appraisal of the merits before rationally coming down against it.
No, they don’t like it and they will tell you so, and furthermore they see these schemes for exactly what they are: their so-called leaders selling them down river for their own political benefit.
So how come the whole idea hasn’t been shut down cold? Because once politicians realize that open support for the concept is political suicide, they simply resort to the style first brought to perfection after the 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives during Bill Clinton’s reign. They sneak it in under the radar when nobody’s watching.
Sometimes this doesn’t work. The former governor of Indiana appparently miscued and let it slip that the state intended to turn a major throughway over to a private operator under 50 year lease, to you know, save the people money and all.
But the electorate wasn’t buying it and they told him so. What to do? No slouch at the highest form of human activity, the old boy realized that he wasn’t running for reelection, so he just said screw ’em, and went ahead and completed the contract with the operator anyway.
Michael Panzner points out in his book “Financial Armageddon” that there is likely to be an increassed push for”PPPs” in our increasingly less beckoning future – presumably because the states really will lack the money to build and maintain these facilities on their own.
Or maybe it’s because as the credit bubble’s consequences gain further force and begin to dissolve the very foundations of numerous aspects of our lives, evaporating the conditions that formerly served as the basis for an undertone of optimism and trust in our societies, the politicians will decide that feigning an allegiance to the people’s sacred trust isn’t worth the trouble in the quid pro quo world of bribery and payoffs that no one bothers to make an effort to conceal anymore.
Hey, if the citizens don’t want to pay to drive, then guys like Rob Blagojevich won’t have to beat around the bush much anymore. This thing’s golden, you don’t just, you know, give it away.
I forgot–the author is Karl Polanyi. He was a polymath, so the range the book integrates is large.
Very true and the whole story, before and after this not-so-small part, is even more relevant, insightful, powerful, and FASCINATING, a mystery story telling how we got here–it should be one of the books that should be absolutely required reading to smarten-up our dumbed-down schooling: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (This is a very tall title to live up to and the book does.) The book in our free-market society is true heresy — you teach it, you get punished.
Part of a review (Fred Block, Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis): An eminent economic historian, reviewing the reception and influence of The Great Transformation,
remarked that “Some books refuse to go away.” It is an apt statement. Although written in the early 1940’s, the relevance and importance of Polanyi’s work has continued to grow. While few books these days have a shelf life of more than a few months or a few years, after many decades, The Great Transformation remains fresh. Indeed, it is indispensable for understanding the dilemmas facing global society at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
There is a good explanation for this durability. The Great Transformation provides the most powerful critique yet produced of market liberalism–the belief that both national societies and the global economy can and should be organized through self-regulating markets. Since the 1980s, and particularly with the end of the Cold War in the early 199’s, this doctrine of market liberalism, under the labels of “Thatcherism,” “Reaganism,” “Neoliberalism,” and “the Washington Consensus,” has come to dominate global politics.