Taxation And PrivatizationBy: masaccio
Sunday November 7, 2010 10:30 am
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Conservative of both parties tell us that the market will provide. And that’s where privatization comes into play. Hyper-rich rich people will use their untaxed cash to buy our crumbling bridges and repair them. We’ll sell them our crumbling subway system, and they will make it work and sparkle. We’ll sell them our schools so they can educate our children. We’ll sell them our water and sewer systems. We’ll sell them the Interstate system and the parking rights in our cities. That list is also endless.
There is the matter of paying for all this. We are assured that corporate persons can do this at a great price to us humans, which we can pay out of our tax savings. We can subsidize the poor with all the money we get from selling our public sector. Then we can pay tolls for traveling from city to city, or we can stay home if we can’t afford to pay. Those of us who use water will pay for our water at market rates, whatever that means.
None of these conservatives has a clue about basic economics. Monopolies exploit their economic power. When one company controls the entire supply of some good, every economic theory says it will extract monopoly prices from those who must have the services, like people who want to park in Chicago.
Enough pretending. There isn’t any magic, and this won’t work. This pseudo-Randian garbage is a mask to hide the ugly demand of hyper-rich corporate and human persons for high-reward, low-risk investments. They don’t want to own bridges, because they can’t make money off them yet. They want schools because they can extract tuition money from parents and subsidies from taxes. They want prisons because they can build new ones, depreciate them, and insure a solid profit by cutting wages and benefits to prison guards, all subsidized by taxes. They want water systems because they can eventually make a fortune selling our dwindling water supplies to the highest bidder, and get subsidies from taxes. They want monopolies so they can extract monopoly profits. They want to use the enforcement powers of government to force payment.
Conservatives of both parties want a society that will come to look like Bladerunner. There is nothing in that society that holds us together as a people. There is only the struggle to survive as individuals.
One of the tools we can use to prevent this grim outcome is taxation. Our species succeeded by mastering the use of tools to solve problems. Conservatives of both parties want to abandon the best part of us homo sapiens.<snip>
Link:
http://firedoglake.com/2010/11/07/taxation-and-privatization/:kick:
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