3 - Public and Private Ownership in Plato and Aristotle

Summary

The privatization of publicly owned and operated industries and services that has occurred in certain countries over the last forty or fifty years is routinely condemned on the political left, yet the grounds of that condemnation often remain unspecified. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the practical advantages of what Cass Sunstein has called “incompletely theorized agreements” in facilitating collective action. But the advantage of distinguishing between different kinds of objections is that doing so allows us to assess their implications independently and therefore weigh and balance different factors in our practical reasoning. Sometimes we might want to object to privatization on straightforward economic grounds: when Chicago sold its parking meters on a seventy-five-year lease for just $1.15 billion, giving up a long-term revenue stream in order to balance the budget for just one year, it seemed less like selling the family silver than selling the family silver mine.