Written by Jenny Hanniver   

I wish everyone knew the history of fire-fighting, mail carying, policing & schools. All were privatized until human beings evolved a minimum of good sense. And they are RE-privatized at our peril.

Let's take fire-fighting. How do you think Crassus, dictator Caesar's fellow triumvir, got so rich? Crassus (his name means 'crass', 'greedy') owned a private fire company that raced to a fire but refused to start fire-fighting till the home owner paid up. If the owner wasn't home or couldn't pay, too bad. The house burned down. Sometimes they set fires for profit. That's capitalism at its most pathologically efficient.

Common sense requires public ownership for public services. The U.S. Post Office and our formerly public utilities have been partially or wholly privatized, with promises of greater efficiency, more honesty and lower costs. Yet each time they prove themselves less efficient, more corrupt, and far more expensive. Enron is a good example--with a CEO who reminded us of Crassus.

Montesquieu, grandfather of the US Constitution, in "The Spirit of Laws" reasoned that no civilized government should ever allow the rich & strong enough freedom to trample the poor & weak. Laws should exist for one purpose only, to provide a barrier to exploitation. "In a true state of nature," he warned, "all persons are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of laws." In this context, law requires the firm hand of government regulation--the only protection standing between exploiters and citizens.