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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Asymmetric who wrote (237991)	11/17/2013 8:57:53 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543150

I have never looked in to that either. It was just always obvious to me that 1. profits bled out of a system leave less money for the system and 2. most for profit systems have even more waste than public interest systems. When I donate to a charity, for example, I look at how much of my money is going to the actual business of the charity. Public education is like that too. When you look at the public model, most of the money goes for teachers' salaries, facilities, and other student centered needs. And despite the doom and gloom from rather specious studies, the public school model works pretty well. I was educated in it, as were you, and probably most of the other folks on SI. It did well by us, and for most of us it's done well by our children and grandchildren. Like many systems in America, it's not perfect, but we could certainly make it a hell of a lot worse, by bleeding money out of it to for profit institutions, who will in turn divert taxpayer money to churches or private hands. Like our private prisons, and our private military forces, it's a mistake to take some things out of public control, and make them profit centers. Making our prisons a "business" seems to have made prison the business of America. Making military contractors big business, helps to give us indefinite war. Where there is profit, there will be graft, and corruption, and the incentive to always increase the profit- and that's really not something we want in certain sectors of our economy- like war, and prisons and education, the inspection of food, police and fire, etc. Some things are so important they are like a sacred trust, even for someone like me, who doesn't particularly believe in the sacred. Other countries, more collectivist countries, understand the importance of the public weal better than we do in this country.