All right. The other day I wrote a piece on why we need to disconnect the profit motive from things that ought to be (and often used to be treated as) public goods, benefiting everyone. Riffing off a comment that sparked the diary, I named four major public goods that have been largely privatized over the past thirty to forty years: democracy, higher education, health care, and justice. In comments, other Kossacks brought up other things that ought to be, or used to be, public goods that have since been privatized: infrastructure, banking, internet access, telecommunications, utilities (gas, water, electricity), public transportation, political campaigns, the military, and all education through graduate school.
If you have more, do list them.
Now, the question is - how do we disconnect these things from the profit motive? Well, the same way they were disconnected from it in the thirties: nationalization and heavy regulation.
I'm not going to give you guys a lot of discussion from me this time - I'd rather let this diary serve as a jumping-off point for community discussion. Let's write some legislation to propose to our representatives that will start cutting the cord between profit and the public goods. What I think what we need to articulate, in each case, is:
1) why the public good in question MUST be considered public and some reasons why privatizing it is bad for the nation and its population,
2) particular regulations that will bring it closer to that goal, and finally,
3) I'll admit that all corporations of whatever kind, public or private, need to make a little profit, but let's propose an upper limit. For example, in California, until the deregulation/Enron crisis, the electric companies were held to a 10% profit beyond their costs, and they were legally prohibited from going beyond that amount. I think 10% profit sounds just fine - even generous. How about you?
Have at it, folks. Hit me.