Quotes About Privatization

Mitt Romney privatizes the gains from his enterprises, but spreads the costs to the rest of us. Seems that 'free stuff' is in the eye of the beholder.

As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized ...

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

There are major efforts to replace public schools with semi-privatized systems that would still be supported by the public but run more or less privately, such as charter schools. There is no evidence that they are any better. For all we know, they're even worse. But this privatization of schools does undermine solidarity and mutual support--dangerous ideas that harm concentrated power.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to run tonsils in order to survive. Now, you can say, they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract - but that's a joke. If you are choice is, do what I tell you are starve, that's not a choice - it's infact what was commonly referred to as 'wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineenth centuries.

Not even mentioned is the possibility, discussed by economist Dean Baker, that the deficit might be eliminated if the dysfunctional privatized health care system were replaced by one similar to those in other industrial societies, which have half the per capita costs and at least comparable health outcomes.

We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that's struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many others in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization.

In Chile, everything from "kindergarten to cemeteries and community swimming pools were put out for bid." Between 1985 and 1992, over two thousand government industries were sold off throughout Latin America. Much of this property passed into the hands of either multinational corporations or Latin America's "superbillionaires," a new class that had taken advantage of the dismantling of the state to grow spectacularly rich.

A minor bureaucrat's demand for payment to process a form is condemned as corruption. A national leader's sweetheart privatization of public assets to friends and relatives is applauded as market liberalization.

Thatcher began the privatization of the most precious part of Britain's social commons, the National Health Service, through what her economic advisers called the 'micro-politics of privatization'. The idea was that the government should gradually cut resources for a popular service so as to undermine faith in its capacity to deliver, leading to acceptance of

As the son of a union activist and a lifelong Democrat, I've always thought that privatizing our public schools is not the answer. We must strengthen public schools.

We recognise the link between environmental failure and social injustice. When the energy sector is privatised and deregulated, it not only tends to pollute more, it also charges the poorest more per unit!

The privatization law draft was recently released and I believe that very soon we will start applying it, of course taking into consideration the provisions of UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo).

I'm a product of public schools. They are resource-challenged, and when you take those dollars away from public schools and send them to private schools, you're further starving the system.

Selling public property is the true Chicago way. Had Mr. Obama not been elected president, the nation's business journals would be falling over one another to praise his city for its daring, market-friendly innovations.

Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense.

Although the Cons vituperate against the high and the mighty, the policies they help enact—deregulating, privatizing—only serve to make the Mods higher and mightier still. And while it may hurt the Mods' feelings to overhear their secretaries referring to them as RINOs, the many rounds of tax cuts the Cons have accomplished have surely made the sting subside. The Mods win even when they lose.

That's the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they'll make sure they're better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules?

This is yet another product of the immensely stupid notion of privatizing the proper functions of government, which is based on the colossally stupid notion that private industry is more honest and more efficient than the public sector, which is itself based on the transcendentally stupid decision by too many states that it is better to light their balls on fire than raise taxes in order to pay for anything anywhere at any time.

Private-sector firms are increasingly active in the prison industry and they and the militantly unionized correctional officers, almost all unskilled labor, constantly lead public demands for more criminal statutes and more draconian penalties.

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

We want to develop innovative ways to promote savings so more Americans can save for their future, but first we need to reject privatization schemes and work together to strengthen Social Security.

Without exception, the brave new technologies of the twentieth century—free use of which was originally encouraged, for the sake of further invention and individual expression—eventually evolved into privately controlled industrial behemoths, the "old media" giants of the twenty-first, through which the flow and nature of content would be strictly controlled for reasons of commerce.

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.