What if we had a government shutdown and no one noticed? It's possible if our lawmakers truly worked to limit government. However, a self-limiting government seems to be a contradiction in terms. Yet there are many tactics government can use to help limit its size, one of which is through privatization.
Privatization means shifting some or all aspects of service delivery from the government to private-sector providers, reducing both the size and cost of government. In discussing one of her main achievements as British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher said, "Privatization is at the center of any program of reclaiming territory for freedom." And this would be freedom from excessive taxation and an overreaching, out-of-control government, and "the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism."
We seem to have forgotten our history of a time when the government wasn't so massive. Limited government means to most politicians what it is limited to today. And if it is larger tomorrow, it will mean what it is limited to tomorrow, but limited government doesn't mean to the politicians what the Constitution intended it to mean. There are, however, a lot of the services the government provides that Washington doesn't have to run.
There is a long list of services that could be privatized, ranging from accounting to zoo operations. Two of these services that drew a great deal of attention during the latest shutdown were air traffic control and airport security, both of which are prime targets for privatization. Canada and many countries in Europe have privatized both their airport screening and air traffic control. Under those reforms, governments were able to retain oversight for aviation while setting into motion improvements in efficiency and innovations making them financially self-supporting.
The question of whether we'd be more at risk if we privatized airport security has already been asked and answered. After a decade of experience with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), it appears that the overall performance of privatized screening companies is at least as good as, if not better than, government screening. For instance, according to ABC News in 2015, "An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation's busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials."
As an informed and engaged people, we should question policymakers on every existing public service as well as the ones being proposed, asking first if we need the public service at all and, if we do, we should ask if those services must be government-produced or if the people could be better served if the private sector provided them.
If done right, privatization makes our lives better by producing higher-quality services at lower cost, delivering greater choices, and ultimately making government more efficient and effective.
Henry David Thoreau once said, "That government is best which governs least." Just a few weeks of the shutdown wreaked havoc from national parks and airports to labels on beer bottles, proving how entwined and overgrown our so-called limited government has become. Privatization is just one of many ways we can reduce government, deficits, and taxation, which benefits us all.
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G. Russell Holt lives in Rogers.
Editorial on 02/07/2019