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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (11938)	5/4/2002 7:01:47 AM
From: Solon	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 21057

What seems to me to be helpful is that reasonable people acknowledge the essentiality of public service. Public service (to reduce it to blunt terms) alleviates individual suffering. It would be helpful for reasonable people to admit the contribution which public service makes to the realization of higher human values; values measured--not by teakettles--but by the actions of humanity at a higher level of social evolution; values which encourage and accommodate a greater output of compassion, and which harness the human urge to protect the weak, and to share in good fortune. It may matter to a private consumer whether he pays a nickel more or less for the teakettle with the pretty flower. Cost, however, is not the predominant concern when dealing with the health or safety of a human child. The predominant value in dealing with human service is that the outcome be successful. As an example: that the child receive clothes, medicine, health care, surrogate parenting, or education. It is an exercise in mockery to compare human services and teakettles as to value. Most private businesses are next to useless by any objective standards. Even when they have a perceived value at an individual level, it is generally a "value" which has been created through slick advertising, and manipulation--the seduction of human emotions and drives such as greed, fear, and competitiveness. Public service is about something much more fundamental to the experience of being human. It is about promoting safety, and protecting human rights and freedoms. It is about alleviating suffering. It is about channelling human compassion so as to give all citizens a common ground of essential benefit. Comparing apples to oranges? More like comparing children to teakettles. Private commerce often has a shallow value, which is more contrived and manipulated than it is essential or foundational. This is not to say that private individuals may not use their profit in very human and benevolent ways. Private individuals and corporations have contributed immensely to raising the overall standard of human existence. But the value of the commerce itself is generally shallow, materialistic, featherbrained, and paltry at the consumer end. That is why we buy it.<g> We are manipulated by fear, greed, competitiveness, and insecurity. At the producer end, the value is merely one of moolah. So the values between seller and buyer, agency and the needy...are all of a different type and kind. Whatever the human need which argues the offering of a particular public service, the taxpayers' first concern is that the need be met and the service delivered. This is de facto achievement of full value. Primary value here is not about money or cost; it is about the outcome being fully commensurate with the intended goal of human relief. The costs, method of delivery, agency structure, and so forth represent the financial cost to taxpayers. They obviously have reality limits below which successful realization of the intended outcome is not possible. It is this optimal efficiency which the "system" is naturally herded toward by the checks and balances through which democratic taxpayers exercise their self interest through media and elected representatives--all devoted to the adversarial system which ensures that the system will gravitate toward optimum efficiency as the only mechanism to survival. Further, there is freedom of information, which ensures that most agencies are transparent and vulnerable to the adversarial self interests of rival political parties and concerned citizens. Polarizing the public and the private, and creating divisiveness, is harmful to social progress (I am not, by the way, suggesting that you have done this). It is reflective of a lack of understanding of the value specific differences that define the two sectors. It is meaningless to speak of either sector as being more valuable or more productive. They are both valuable and neither can duplicate the other. Thus, they are both necessary, as well. Certainly, every public agency is, in effect, another private business...paid for by all citizens. Thus, each of those "businesses" may be individually criticized, and analyzed as to both necessity and to process. And they ought to be, and always have been. To criticize them carte blanche, however, is to display a rather naive and callow misunderstanding of what is meant by a civilized community. In these Public "private" businesses, where every citizen is on the Board of Directors, the return is not a teakettle...but a safer, healthier, sounder, and more homogeneous citizenship. A human being and a teakettle are not comparable on any rational scale of value. Those who attempt to make them so are simply unaware of the larger picture of human society and community. I will be away till next Thursday. So have a good weekend..