The Zeal of Our Age
- Avihay Dorfman & Alon Harel, Against Privatization as Such (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem Legal Research Paper No. 15-29, 2015), available at SSRN.
- Avihay Dorfman & Alon Harel, The Case Against Privatization, Philosophy & Public Affairs 41(1), 67-102 (2013), available at SSRN.
- John Gardner, The Evil of Privatization, Univ. of Oxford (2014), available at SSRN.
Privatization is a phenomenon that legal theorists and legal philosophers have begun to notice and to stake out positions on, for and against. Privatization is defined with reference to the (too?) familiar distinction between public and private actors. Privatization happens when a good, service, or a function that is typically supplied by state government, through the efforts of its officials and personnel, comes to be provided by private actors, perhaps still at state expense. In a pair of recent articles, Avihay Dorfman and Alon Harel have singled out private prisons and mercenary armies as paradigm examples of privatized public goods. Dorfman and Harel lament the fact that both advocates and opponents of privatization conceive the normative issue in purely “instrumentalist” terms. Which type of actor, public or private, can provide a given good or service more efficiently? Discussions therefore deal in contingencies, and at retail level. Dorfman and Harel argue in their 2013 article that this sort of approach fails to engage the intuitive sense that there is something intrinsically worrisome about privatization that pervades it wholesale. It isn’t centrally a question whether private prisons, say, are more or less likely to do the job efficiently (without compromising prisoner rights). It is rather a conceptual question whether there is a category of goods—“intrinsically public goods”—that can only be provided by the state, directly, by its officials; and, for instance, whether criminal punishment is among them. The answer to conceptual question, and the answer’s retail application might allow the possibility of privatization: in which case, but only then, they say, it is proper to go on to the contingent question about the relative efficiency of public and of private delivery. Continue reading "The Zeal of Our Age"
