PRESTOPUNDIT

PROF. BENJAMIN BARBER loathes economic liberty and he has a boat-load of cliché to prove it. This is nursery school leftist blubbering -- the intellectual equivalent of paint-by-numbers in the realm of political ideas. I can't imagine who it could possibly persuade. Does Michael Kinsley find this sort of stuff profound? Is he persuaded by it? I rather hope he's embarrassed that he's publish it. Quotable:

Conservatives ought to recognize even more quickly than liberals that privatization — whether of education, housing or Social Security — makes us less of a public. It diminishes the republic — the res publica, or public things that define our commonweal. It turns the common "we" into a collection of private "me's." It opts for market Darwinism, in which smart investors prosper but others lose, rather than social justice as its organizing principle. It demeans the "us" by turning "us" into "it" — the big, bad, faceless government bureaucracy. And it privileges the private and individual by appealing to market liberty, as if people could really be free one by one or as consumers alone.

Private market liberty is not political liberty; it is only personal choice. It may generate private benefits ("I want an SUV!" or "Give me 100 shares of EBay!") but offers nothing for the common good (a fuel conservation policy, for instance). It is as citizens that we pay our Social Security taxes, and it should be as citizens that we enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Yet privatization tries to convince us that the consumer is simply another, more efficient, form of the citizen. The citizen who votes with her dollars rather than her ballots. But dollars don't deliberate. They don't seek common ground. They are not bearers of empathy and imagination. As education consumers in Chicago or Washington, we can select the "best schools" for our children, but as citizens we need public schools that help make us all public citizens. As consumers in Los Angeles, we can choose among hundreds of automobile models, but only as citizens can we make the choices that create a public transportation system serving all.

Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: It dissolves the bonds that tie us together. The social contract takes us out of the state of nature; it asks us to give up a part of our private liberty to do whatever we want in order to secure common liberty for all. Privatization puts us back in the state of nature where we possess the natural power to get whatever we can but lose the common power to secure everything to which we have a natural right.

Posted by Greg Ransom