There are arguments for and against.

It gets complicated and messy.

Gas, water, electricity, sewage, trash removal, these are service industries. When they’re government owned and operated, by good government, the people, their goal is to provide services.

When they’re privatized, the goal is to make money for the corporation. Service is sold with a margin of profit. The customers pay extra so the owners can get richer.

Government-owned is subject to oversight and regulation. When the government is us, we don’t want to overcharge ourselves.

Privatization argues that they can innovate and offer new and better because they’re not bound so tightly by regulations. They say that government is tied up in red tape. The private “they” pay money to have the media, which they privately own and control, convince us that the government can’t be trusted, is slow, out of date, behind the times. They famously say that the problem with government is that government is the problem.

They want us to forget, ideally to never know, that we are the government.

It’s a Master Plan that we’ve been trained to accept and adulate. The schools choose what we read and what and how to think. The courts keep us in line.

I do have problems with authority. I don’t like people controlling me. I went through it for years in various stages of oppression when I taught in schools where rigid administration at odds with staff forced a lack of vision, and then, when results didn’t “measure up,” were replaced by the new breed of tyrants.

Sometimes, O blessed memory, the administration and staff worked in harmony, so I know it can be done.

I lived in the time after the last World War when the world calmed down enough to catch its breath, we had an expanding middle class, the bottom brought up, the top brought down.

People became neighbors, life was good for everybody, and we all read well enough to understand democracy.

But greed, a disease never stamped out, breeds in the brain. The Master Plan spreads out to control more and more, Orwell wrote the script, and it’s working like a charm.

It seems we always live on the edge.

I’ve gone through phases of hope, and am in one now. In a few days, I’ll know which way to turn, either to celebrate, or dig in and work harder.

I write a blog, hoping someone will read it. I have books almost ready.

I want to live to see the world better.

As my students used to say, “You got me thinking, and now I can’t stop.”