Pappa wrote:Seth wrote:The ONLY public employees we require are our elected representatives, who should get a salary fixed by a vote of the people.
What about the police and other emergency services? Do you think the police should be provided by private enterprise?
Sure, why not? Better yet, do your own policing.
How about the fire service? Should we be taxed to pay for that (whether the service is public or private)?
Most of America operates with volunteer firefighters often supported by donations. I see no reason why municipalities should not contract with private companies to provide equipment and personnel rather than having them be public employees. Fire is a "common enemy" threat, like war, which justifies government levying taxes to provide service. If a fire starts in your house, it can easily spread to other houses or property, so it's appropriate for you to pay your share of the resources needed to prevent the spread of fire, just like it's reasonable for you to pay your share of protecting the nation against aggressors or paying your share of public health spending to prevent the spread of communicable diseases.
But that does NOT mean that those who actually do the work or provide the service must be on the government's payroll. It's far more efficient and cost-effective for government to hire private contractors to provide such services. That's what happens with federal wildfire firefighters for example. Private companies hire, train, equip and supervise wildland firefighters and they bid for contracts with the Forest Service every year to make money fighting forest fires. The same model can be used with rural and urban firefighters equally beneficially.
Doing so allows the government to pick and choose the best contractor at the lowest price to do the job, and it keeps the contractor on his toes providing the very best service, lest the contract be cancelled or not renewed. Competition keeps costs down and the public is not responsible for paying for pensions for contract employees, the contractor is. That feature alone would cut the cost of fire services in most cities by at least half if not more, because some of the biggest deficits cities are facing, which are bankrupting some cities, are the unmanageable gold-plated public pension obligations for fire, police and other public workers.
Privatizing ALL government services and operations immediately relieves the government of those obligations, and thereby the taxpayers from having to support retired public workers getting benefits that far exceed what's normal in the private sector.
And no, Gawdzilla, battling private firefighting companies are not a necessary result of privatizing such services. Nothing prevents the city from REGULATING how adjacent contract fire companies operate to prohibit "poaching" or other such malfeasance. That was New York City's great mistake. They looked at the problem of privately-paid fire companies and came up with exactly the wrong answer to the problem. That's because at the time, Tammany Hall was rife with corruption to begin with, and nobody was interested in creating a cost-effective private contract system, everybody, including the Mayor and Council, just wanted to get as much graft as possible.
The obvious solution was districting, city-issued contracts, and strict regulations on pain of being disbanded on how the companies had to be equipped, trained and managed.
That's eminently possible nowadays, if only the public employee fire and police unions can be broken and eliminated, which should be a priority for the Republicans when they take over Washington next year.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
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