And it isn't about a better balance between the private and public sectors. Privatization is about the gutting of government, about fundamentally reducing and permanently changing the role of the public sector. It is a radical, right-wing agenda to hamstring government's ability to serve the public interest. It's about creating private monopolies for essential services. It's about forcing present and future generations to pay through the nose for services that once came as an entitlement as citizens of this great country.
Privatization destroys the public accountability inherent in public services.
So, in a very real way, it undermines democracy itself. Privatization also strikes at the moral and social fabric of our society. The concepts of equality and social justice are absent from the privatizer's vocabulary. History teaches us that we can put no faith in the private sector to redress inequities and injustices. For almost every significant social breakthrough in this country has come from the public sector.