Quotes About Privatization

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened.

In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That's the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?

As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

There is no more staunch advocate for taking public dollars and giving them to private schools - private schools that can pick the students they want to teach - than Betsy DeVos.

The president and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly promised to revisit Social Security privatization after November. But Americans have already said, loud and clear, that they don't want Social Security to be privatized or dismantled.

Privatization is more efficient and effective in some cases, but not in intelligence.

The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.

Political solutions-accountable to the people and enforceable by their elected representatives- deserve another shot before we throw in the towel and settle for corporate codes, independent monitors and the privatisation of our collective rights as citizens.

Katrina was not unforeseeable. It was the result of a political structure that subcontracts its responsibility to private contractors and abdicates its responsibility altogether. —Harry Belafonte, American musician and civil rights activist, September 20052

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.

Communal forests around the world are being turned into privatized tree farms and preserves so their owners can collect something called "carbon credits," a lucrative scam I'll explore later.

Finding new ways to privatize the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do; left to its own devices, it is capable of nothing else.

Piety is the privatization of the world as the story of one's self and one's salvation, and without the, yes, sometimes offensive conviction that one is the object of God's special, and indeed exclusive care, without the rearrangement that places oneself and one's salvation at the center of all things, there is no piety—that is, in fact, what defines this very powerful virtue.

Existe un motivo por el cual muchas funciones tradicionales del gobierno, como la recogida de basura, o la administración de las prisiones, han sido subcontratadas cada vez más a empresas privadas, con ánimo de lucro. Estas empresas habitualmente realizan el mismo trabajo a menor coste o con mayor calidad, o ambas cosas a la vez.

Prayer is often stereotyped in our culture as a form of pietism, a lamentable privatization of religion. Even many Christians seem to regard prayer as a grocery list we hand to God, and when we don't get what we want, we assume that the prayers didn't "work." This is privatization at its worst, and a cosmic selfishness.

The military government had decided public services should be in private hands. Health was not a right, but a consumer good to be bought and sold.

Who wants to privatize Medicare.

Terrorism, War & Bankruptcy are caused by the privatization of money, issued as a debt and compounded by interest.

Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn.

Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.

If we don't respect public goods; if we permit or encourage the privatization of public space, resources and services; if we enthusiastically support the propensity of a younger generation to look exclusively to their own needs: then we should not be surprised to find a steady falling-away from civic engagement in public decision-making.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor.

Governments, in short, now increasingly farm out their responsibilities to private firms

privatization reverses a centuries-long process whereby the state took on things that individuals could not or would not do.