Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

One of the buzzwords you'll hear in government circles is “public-private partnerships.” This concept really started to gain steam in the 1970s as the so-called “Reagan Revolution” occurred when Baby-Boomers started voting to lower taxes and increase government benefits. What used to be covered by the public coffers: university tuition, infrastructure, utilities; found themselves without funding, and government desperately grasped at whatever straw was offered. Private industry was there to make a devil's bargain: they would provide the money if the operation was turned into a profitable enterprise for them; hence, for-profit transportation, communication, and healthcare. Worse, it was the difference between government accounting practices and generally accepted accounting principles that let elected officials con the public into these unequal, ridiculously byzantine contracts without anybody being the wiser; news sources certainly didn't seem to know or care what hidden obligations the public was being saddled with.

And it didn't stop there: anywhere government officials thought they could pursue their own unfunded pet projects, they went to the private sector and prostituted out public goods: sports stadiums, broadcast bandwidth, toll roads & bridges, hospitals, and anything else that the public could be badgered into paying for, all under the guise of “it’s good for everyone.” However, whatever public-private partnerships were supposed to be, of course, like all unsupervised power, they're actually conduits for graft, bribes, monopolies, market distortion & sweetheart jobs for government official’s children.