The Loons! Look Norman at the Loons!

A few years ago there was a popular film starring Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn called On Golden Pond. One of the more memorable lines from that film was Ethel Thayer's quotes about the loons. I have been reminded of these quotations in the past few weeks by the actions of Congress.

There are certain members of Congress especially Republicans who are acting loony. They gleefully anticipate taking Americans off Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They also want to get rid of the ACA. 

Ironically, Ayn Rand, the founder of Libertarianism accepted Social Security and Medicare when she was dying of lung cancer. She did so under the name of her husband, Frank O’Conner.

We can see Ethel and Norman sitting in the visitor’s gallery laughing at the Republicans and saying, “Look! The loons! The loons!”

Why are these loony people trying to do these things? It is because of a loony belief system we call libertarianism. Loony Libertarianism believes that there should be little if any government involvement in people’s lives. A core belief is that the free market will solve any and all problems. In other words, privatize everything. Unfortunately, loony Libertarianism doesn’t work. 

Many states and the Federal government have outsourced former state services to private businesses. One good example is the private prison movement. Over the past several years more and more states have tried to privatize prisons. What have been the results?

States are finding that most private prisons fail at rehabilitation, fail at protecting prisoners from violent inmates and guards and end up being more costly. Results have been so poor that there is a nationwide call for abolishing private prisons. Many prisoners are at the time of this writing, on strike, protesting low wages and accusing the prison system of slave-like practices.

Similarly, private for-profit colleges are closing, leaving students stuck with unpaid loans and no degrees. Corinthian College and Trump University are prime examples.

We all know about the Epipen scandal and how the cost went from$100 to $600. The Epipen became so expensive that Cigna dropped its coverage.

I could go on and on with many more examples but time does not permit this. I have always asked one question to my libertarian friends that no one has ever been able to answer. The question is this: how many children have to die before the marketplace recognizes that a child’s safety seat is defective? One? Ten? A hundred? Yet what other outcome can one expect if there are no safety standards in place?

We know and common sense tells us that many private businesses will cut corners to make a profit. Yet often these cuts come at the price of American’s health and safety.

A quote from an article by Aimee Picchi in Moneywatch Sept 29, 2016 says,

“Although privatization of public services in the U.S. isn’t new, the government budget crunch that slammed federal, state and municipal agencies following the housing crash has sharply accelerated the move to outsource public services to for-profit entities…

Yet privatization may not be the balm that lawmakers and elected officials hope. Privatization often leads to higher, and more, fees, while decreasing wages and benefits as government workers are replaced by lower-paid contractors, according to a report from policy research group In the Public Interest. 

A private business “goal will be to generate as much money as possible at the lowest cost,” said Donald Cohen, executive director of In the Public Interest…

Meanwhile, privatization often leads to troubling outcomes for Americans.

Take the spread of for-profit probation companies, which are relied on by more than 1,000 courts to sentence hundreds of thousands of people to probation, often because of unpaid fines for traffic tickets and other minor infractions. For-profit companies such as Judicial Correction Services don’t charge the courts or towns for their services, which may seem appealing to elected officials. Instead, they make money by tacking on fees to the initial traffic ticket. 

When Americans are unable to pay those fees, they can end up behind bars. In one case, a woman was arrested seven times, served 25 days in jail and paid $640 after writing a check for $28.93 that bounced. 

Existing services that are privatized also often become much more expensive for consumers, In the Public Interest found. 

Take the GED, a high-school equivalency test that was developed during World War II as a way to help returning U.S. soldiers and sailors demonstrate that they had the basic high school skills employers wanted. It was a pen-and-paper test that cost $30 to take -- until it was privatized.

In 2014, the nonprofit American Council on Education outsourced the test to the for-profit education company Pearson. The cost of taking the GED jumped $120 and switched to computer-based testing. Since then, the number of people taking the GED has plunged by two-thirds, along with the percentage of those who pass it…

When it comes to the IRS, the agency has tried outsourcing tax collection before. It wasn’t successful. The National Taxpayer Advocate, Nina Olson, wrote in a 2008 report that the private program not only fell short of its collection goals, but also that it was “an inherently governmental function, which should only be undertaken by IRS employees trained to protect taxpayer rights.”

With its latest effort at privatization, the IRS said that its four private collections companies would have to abide by the consumer protection provisions in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Yet debt collectors are no strangers to breaking the provisions in the law, with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau collecting $13 million in 2014 in fines for “egregious debt collection violations.”

Privatization ‘is the most regressive way to pay for services, more than sales taxes or anything else,’ Cohen said. ‘If our goal is to reduce poverty and crime, the last thing you would want to do is make someone poorer and trap them in debt.’”

So given the choice between a for-profit school or a for-profit hospital vs. a non-profit school or hospital choose the non-profit every time. It's only common sense. Don’t be loony.