Look at this meme.

It came through my Facebook feed this morning. That’s right, I follow politics on Facebook. I’m an addict on both FB and Twitter. (I must just like to be angry a lot.) These things come through multiple times a day, but it’s only once in a while that they give me a real gut punch.  

This woman, this huge company and this outsourcing are the reasons I get frightened and angry every time anyone suggests privatizing vital government functions. “The private sector knows how to streamline and create efficiencies that big, lumbering, ineffective government doesn’t,” they say.

Sometimes.

At their best, private companies are well-run, efficient operations that produce quality products at affordable prices. They pay a living wage and provide good benefits to their employees who are almost all American and local.  Everyone prospers and the economy thrives.

When they are at their best.

But private companies don’t usually work at their best, do they?  If they did we wouldn’t have had the economic meltdown of 2008. If they did, most of the food we eat wouldn’t be filled with unnecessary additives that have proven to be dangerous if not deadly in the long run. If they did, 13 people wouldn’t have died because of the business decisions of General Motors execs.

Before long greed sets in and corners start to be cut. The owners want more profit. The market needs to be dazzled so the company’s stock prices don’t fall. Sure, they can cut little things, unimportant things. Who’ll even notice? How about employee benefits? Benefits are so expensive and what does the company really get out of them. Or cutting employee wages? Anyone who’s not happy with what they’re making can move on to another job. Except they can’t, can they? Most workers aren’t highly educated and many don’t have multiple current skills sets that would allow them to just get another job. And most aren’t so mobile that they can move to where the jobs are.

The free market is a great system to live with when things are going well.  When things go south, the little guys get thrown under the bus while the big guys get bailed out and blame the whole downturn on excessive regulation.

Regulations aren’t the problem. For one thing, regulations are enacted as a response to prior bad acts. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 that killed 146 people was one. The Elixir Sulfanilamide Incident of 1937 was another. There are no regulations on the private sector that weren’t inspired by something terrible or underhanded that was perpetrated in the private sector.

Business people are out to make a buck. And why shouldn’t they? That’s the American way. I believe in a semi-free market. My problem is that there is no limit to the “job creators'” (That term still makes me laugh every time I think of it.) quest for more money.  If they can’t force concessions from the government and their workers, they’re only too happy to move operations Mexico or India or China or wherever. If it means more profit, they will do it.

I don’t want these people running any part of the government that I depend on. Privatizing jails and youth detention centers has already shown what a disaster it is. Private prisons need prisoners to make a profit. They don’t want a decrease in the crime rate because it means empty cells, and they’ve shown themselves more than willing to bribe judges to fill them.  Chicago has even found that turning over their parking meters to a for-profit group was a huge mistake.

Government can’t solve everything.  It’s not made for that.  It is, however, there for you and me. Private companies are there for themselves. Government may be ponderous and expensive, but there are services that it has to provide because providing that has to be the endgame.

I don’t want Acme Discount Lighting to take over the streetlights then decide that electricity is so expensive that they’ll only turn them on four nights a week. I don’t want Joe’s Water and Electric to take over utilities and start squeezing us with astronomic prices because they can.

I do want to know that essential services will be provided for you and me and everyone who lives in the US. We all pay taxes of one sort or another (no matter how many misguided or deceitful people tell you differently) and we deserve to be the beneficiaries of those taxes on at least a basic level. We’ll never get that from private companies. Ultimately we’ll only wind up with higher prices and lower levels of service. But that will be OK because profits will be up for the streamlined and efficient “service providers,” right?

No wonder that online quiz said there was a 95% chance I’d vote for Bernie Sanders.