Ever since the Reagan Revolution, we've treated the open market as a solution to all problems. Considering the track record, why do we keep doing this?
I was listening to the radio yesterday when a man came on to advocate the creation of a private, independent, open-market version of FEMA, because the current one was obviously not working at all. It was the same claims you always hear in such. FEMA is political, a private organization would not be political, FEMA is expensive and inefficient, a for-profit organization would look to eliminate inefficiencies, and so on.
This is of course nothing but malarkey and I don't understand why it's still treated as the truth. Private enterprise has one goal: to make money. If you're running a bank, or selling cars, or selling burgers, then that's actually a good thing. Your drive to make money forces you to ensure your customers get good products at good prices, otherwise they'll go elsewhere and you won't be able to make money. But when it comes to massive organizations whose primary objective is to repair infrastructure or save lives, the profit motive runs counter to those goals.
The best example of this were the privately owned fire departments of the late 1800s. With the rize of large, flammable cities heated entirely by wood and coal stoves, fire departments made themselves essential, and many enterprising young men founded fire brigades to answer the call. The problem is that since these were for-profit enterprises, they would only seek to put out fires on houses which were paying dues to them. This was all well and good if your house was set alight and they were nearby, but if they were too far away putting out another fire, or your neighbor's house was on fire and it threatened to spread to yours, there was little that could be done. This is why private fire departments were replaced with public ones around the turn of the century, since publically owned fire departments put out any fire in the city regardless of whose property was on fire. The fact that members of public fire departments put profits secondary to saving lives and property has made them invaluable, and they are routinely lauded as heroes because of this.
I would no more want FEMA to be private than I would my local fire department. If FEMA was private, then they would seek to profit from the disaster, which is not only morally objectionable, but which ensures that any services they provide would be of the lowest possible quality. Also, there's a good chance that they would seek to extort survivors by charging exorbitant fees for assistance, because those in need would be unable to go anywhere else for help, and so private companies could charge whatever they liked for whatever they had, and citizens would be forced to live with it.
Private enterprise and the "Free Market" only work when the market is truly free, and customers are free to make different choices, or reject companies, or otherwise "vote with their dollars." But in the event of a privatised government agency, that is rarely possible. We need to stop pretending that private enterprise solves all problems, and instead focus on rooting out the corruption and bad politics that ruins the agencies.