Public V. Private

I meant to link to this Harold Meyerson column on the lax accountability measures applied to government contractors when it came out, but I didn't. So I'll do it now. The most telling bit comes at the end, when Harold points to legislation from Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who wants to "create a central database that would enable officials at one department to know when a contractor has screwed up at another." What's remarkable about her bill isn't its existence, but the fact that, currently, one department doesn't know when contractors for another have screwed up.

Despite being "a man with an apparent soft spot for command-and-control economics," I've got some appreciation for the efficiencies of the market, and its superiority in most pursuits. But using "the market" and simply outsourcing public services to private contractors are not the same thing. Markets require the fulfillment of a fair number of preconditions to work effectively. Among those conditions are competition between providers and accountability for participants.

But the way Republicans often sate the market, by simply giving a public contract to some private corporation while allowing minimal competition and totally abdicating any responsibility to conduct oversight, simply combines the worst of the public sector with the worst of the private sector. And so you get situations like the one Harold recounts, where the contractor hired to protect the Department of Homeland Security finds an envelope filled with white powder and tells the employee to "[take] the envelope outside and...go wash off the powder, which she did, passing directly in front of Chertoff's office on her way to the ladies' room." Brilliant! And yet that contractor kept their position for another year, and no other departments that used their services were alerted to the massive incompetence of the corporation, at least not until the recent hearings led by the Democrats.