Pry Profit out of Public Services

Three vital services that have no room for profiteering.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a capitalist everything looks like profit.

There’s a moronic argument out there that if you don’t believe that capitalism is god’s gift to humanity then you are a socialist. Conversely, a growing segment of society believes that capitalism has no redeeming qualities and that pure socialism is the only way forward. As usual, both extremes are wrong. The answer is somewhere in the middle. But what does that middle look like in practice?

That, my friends, is a question for a much longer article. I do, however, want to talk about three arenas whose sweet spots lie far to capitalism’s left. These are three industries (I hesitate to even use that word) that have no business being for-profit.

Healthcare

Let’s take the headline maker first. If America has proven anything over its lifetime it is this: For-profit healthcare does not work. That’s not to say that the answer is a government-owned socialized system (something that even many of the most socialist European countries don’t have), though it might be. It is to say that no one should garner obscene levels of wealth from human suffering. Period.

The biggest problem with the free market approach to healthcare is that it is not and can never be free. A free market requires a customer with choice, which is absent in healthcare. Every single human being in the history of the world has gotten sick or injured. I know this because if someone had bucked the trend we’d all know about it. If you break your leg, you need healthcare. Period. If you get cancer, you need healthcare. Period. So if we are all forced to use a service then there can be no free market.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine treating a broken leg like buying a TV. “How much will it cost to fix my leg? — But what if I don’t want the cast, would that be cheaper? — Fine, you know what I’ll go to the next hospital they’ll want my business.” Yeah, ridiculous.

There are some helpful articles out there that dive into the nuances of the different public healthcare systems work. Here’s one, this one’s particularly helpful and this one from the World Economic Forum gets into the costs a bit more. I am not qualified to talk about which system works the best among the more socialized systems but I am qualified to say that our “free market” hodgepodge system does not work.

On second thought, that’s not entirely true. It works wonderfully if you are wealthy but for the rest of us, not so much.

Prisons (and Immigration Centers)

Unlike with healthcare where the “government/for-profit” balance can be somewhat fluid, there is absolutely no room for profit-making in the field of corrections. Check out this article from World Finance. Among the “highlights” are:

1. “… both the CCA (now CoreCivic - Market Cap. $2.3B) and GEO Group (Market Cap. $4.4B) have supported laws like California’s three-strikes law and policies aimed at continuing the War on Drugs.”

2. “… the CCA would require a 90 percent occupancy guarantee from the states. Were prisoner levels to fall below 90 percent, then the state would have to pay the company for the shortfall. This would incentivize states to lock up as many people as possible, and for as long as possible.”

3. “while the country is home to only five percent of the world’s population, it caters to around 25 percent of its prison population.”

If a sick person isn’t free to explore the market, an imprisoned one damn sure isn’t. It is vital that we own our obsession with incarceration. If America is going to be the country that lumps the School-to-Prison Pipeline in with its obsession with oil pipelines then the very least we can do is include it in our budget.

Better yet, let’s spend resources to transform children into educated citizens rather than incarcerated criminals.

Education

Speaking of creating an educated citizenry, let’s get profit out of the classroom. As much as I want to get into why our “Prepare for the Workforce” theory of education is a problem, that is an article for another day. What I will say is that a successful society requires an educated citizen; therefore a successful society should together share the costs of educating the citizen.

Profiteering institutions answer only to the bottom line. There is no incentive to put the student first, and so the student is never put first. I am not saying that there is no place for private education, only that there is no place for for-profit education.

I am starting work on an article about “The Purpose of Education” so I won’t spend a lot of time on the topic here. I do want to take a minute to talk about the one-step plan you can follow to get the profit (and the profiteers) out of essential services.

Get Involved

We have to show up. We have to speak out. We have to be there. That’s it. That’s the one step plan. That’s the way you boycott the billionaires (and wannabe billionaires) who are transforming our social system into a profit pipeline designed to keep us floundering and them profiting. Boycotting these billionaires is not as straightforward as banishing Bezos or zeroing out Zuckerberg but it might be more important.

It only takes a generation (sometimes less) to shift a paradigm. In twenty years we can either be a nation built for prosperity or one built for profit. I’d rather be the former.

The Thank You

Thank you for reading my Substack! If you’d like to subscribe I think there’s like 8 different ways to do that on the app/website. If you’d like to take the Boycott Billionaires message into the analog world with a t-shirt (stickers to come) feel free to drop by my Etsy Shop for a minute. Either way, thank you so much for reading my work and more importantly for fighting the good fight!