8 - Privatizing Social Services

Summary

The involvement of private entities in performing government functions, whether publicly financed or removed from public responsibility, is hardly new. Accelerated with support from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and US President Ronald Reagan, the use of private companies is generally advanced in terms of efficiency and cost savings. Special issues are posed when governments outsource duties closely related to core governmental functions, such as criminal justice (including policing, prosecuting, and punishing) and national defense (including intelligence gathering and analysis, interrogation of enemies and detainees, and war fighting); the absence of robust private markets and the departure from public values in these domains make reliance on private for-profit providers especially problematic. Also, direct and indirect involvement of private interests could in fact distort public decisions about whether and how to conduct armed hostilities, and how much to incarcerate people for infractions of laws.