Deregulation and Privatization: Kill the Umpire!

[Q]

Kill the umpire!

By Ernest Partridge
University of California, Riverside

September 7, 2001

Excerpts:

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"The members who spoke in this capital said 'no' to taxes because they loved freedom. They argued, "why should the fruits of our labors go to the crown across the sea." Well, in the same sense we ask today, "why should the fruits of our labors go to that capital across the river?" . . . We, like the patriots of yesterday, are struggling to increase the measure of liberty enjoyed by our fellow citizens. We're struggling, like them, for selfgovernment—selfgovernment for the family, selfgovernment for the individual and the small business, and the corporation . . . What people earn is their money. Seventy two years after its inception, what is our Federal tax system? It is a system that yields great amounts of revenue, even greater amounts of disorder, discontent and disobedience. is not considered bad behavior. After all, goes this thinking, what's wrong with cheating a system that is itself a cheat? That isn't a sin, it's a duty!"

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Pop Quiz: Who said that? Abbie Hoffman? Randy Weaver? Timothy McVeigh? Some other anarchistic militia nut? Wrong! It was Ronald Reagan, fomenting rebellion against the very government over which he presided.

The triumph of the antigovernment message is so complete that it has retreated from public debate and has become a virtual presupposition of our public discourse—an article of faith so "obvious" that very few even bother to question it.

"...we are now casually dismantling a civic and political order that is the envy of world—the sort of civil society that the Russians and the former Soviet republics are desperately attempting to achieve. And so we find such spectacularly successful institutions as the Voice of America, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation, under attack in the thoughtless and relentless assault on "big government." Furthermore, "privatization" has torn the heart out of the public interest content of public broadcasting. Support for our common cultural heritage is likewise under attack, as socalled "conservatives" in Congress have gutted the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. And only a spirited defense from the scholarly institutions saved the Social Science and the Ethics and Values Studies programs of the National Science Foundation from fiscal knives of the "conservatives."

All the while, deregulation and privatization march along: today the penal system and the public schools (which, a century ago, facilitated e pluribus unum), next—who knows? Perhaps the courts. After all, even the Congress has at last become a commodity, as the Supreme Court proclaims, in the Buckley decision, "one dollar, one vote"—neglecting the words carved above its entrance: "Equal Justice Under Law."

A couple of years ago, amidst the logorrhea of cable TV commentary on the Clinton scandals, we recorded (from PBS) this gem of an observation by Michael Lerner:

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"I think the major accomplishment in politics in the past 20 years has been the destruction of the public sphere. Most of the people elected to Congress in both parties, intentionally or otherwise, doing the bidding of their highest donors. A major goal of the corporate interests of this country is to undermine the public sphere so that there would be no control over corporations as they pursues their agendas. Over the course of the past 20 years they have been incredibly successful in discrediting politics, and that is a major accomplishment."

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http://gadfly.igc.org/liberal/umpire.htm

- Read the entire article. It's worth the time.