Is It Unwise to Privatize? Short answer: It all depends.

• Author: Donahue, John D.
• Position: The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back

Caption: The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back

by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian

New Press, 368 pp.

Privatization is one of the English language's more woebegone words. It's a plugugly Frankenstein's monster of a term--a noun born of a verb carved out of an adjective. And nobody can quite agree on what it means. To some, it refers to contracting out the delivery of publicly funded services. To others, it's transferring governmental assets to private hands. Still others take the broad view, labeling as privatization the overall shrinkage of the public sector.

Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian say it's all of the above, and they say to hell with it.

Cohen is the founder and leader of an Oakland advocacy group, and Mikaelian is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and editor. Their spirited jeremiad flows from a vision far grander than fixing any one policy. "We need a shared commitment to public values and a movement that can embed those values into systems of laws, policies, institutions, governing practices, and decision-making at all levels of government," they write.

That's certainly a sentiment I can get behind, but such profound cultural change rarely happens in a hurry. And chasing America's private sector from public roles is neither necessary nor sufficient for this kind of communitarian transformation.

It would be folly, of course, to deny the damage inflicted by the wrongheaded involvement of business organizations and market principles in American governance. Cohen and Mikaelian array a long list of outrages: The city council in Kansas City, Missouri, turning the sidewalks in a rowdy nightlife district over to a business consortium itching to impose security measures harsher than government can get away with. An education management company in Ohio riding roughshod over students and taxpayers alike in its relentless pursuit of revenues. The squalid predation of many for-profit colleges. Georgia's preposterous decision to put its legal code behind a private paywall. The examples demonstrate that private engagement, poorly managed, can indeed undermine public goods and services. Appalling as each anecdote may be, however, the litany of baneful tales--selected from the whole country, with some going back to colonial times--comes to feel as cherry-picked and unsystematic as parallel right-wing horror stories about brain-dead government.

In the first few pages, the authors define privatization as "the transfer of control over public goods to private hands." Most would agree that this sounds pretty noxious, but the straw man definition misrepresents a definite risk as an inherent feature, comparable to defining progressivism as "putting bureaucrats in charge of your personal business." Cohen and Mikaelian don't really attempt a disciplined effort to...