Question

1) Should all government services be privatized? Should any? If so, which ones

2) What are the potential advantages and disadvantages of privatizing correction services (prisons)?

3) What are the social implications of privatizing correction services (prisons).

Answer 1

1) Privatization refers the transfer of various services which government owns and regulate to the private sector. The main argument for privatization comes from the inefficiency of the government.It is often said that the government is corrupt and incurs a lot of unnecessary expense on providing these services which defeats the whole purpose behind it as the costs are often more than the benefits.The private sector is often termed as cost efficient and so,they are regarded as to have the best managerial capacity to run these government activities at minimum cost.

These services such as running prisons,social security,public broadcasting and public schools are some of the essential services that the government provide to the society at either free of cost or at very low price with an aim to increase the welfare of the society.

The private sector will not be motivated with the same ideology as the government and therefore,they will try to reduce costs by lowering wages,reducing the quality of the service and will always be motivated to increase their profit without being answerable to the public.This is often true in the case of prisons where they actually costs more than the public prisons and their staff is unequipped to deal with an emergency situation.

The other good example is of public schools which are setup with an aim to provide low cost education to the masses and especially to those people who cannot afford costly private schools.Privatizing the schools will mean that the education level of the country will go down.Often these schools are not-for-profit and they merely serve the society so they should definitely not be privatized.

Also,the health services in the form of social welfare should never be privatized as they are basic needs of every individual.An individual should be able to afford them instead of paying high premium on them.

The services which can be privatized can be the infrastructure,development of the transport system and often the projects which requires a huge amount of resources,are time consuming and demands specialization because private companies hires specialized workers and are very cost-efficient without compromising with the quality in dealing with such projects.

The government cannot provide everything to the society and so the privatization is must in various industries.The various advantages of privatization are that it is cost-efficient,it often involves efficient and effective decision making and systems in place and free of political influence which takes them less time to complete a given task in an optimum manner.

However, there are various disadvantages associated with privatization too which often put them in bad light such as low quality of service and that they are profit driven rather than service and that they are corrupt too and makes side deals with the politicians for profit and to get away with the regulations in place.The government should keep those services with itself which are meant to provide welfare to the whole society with itself and privatize those which can be managaed at low cost without sacrificing the quality such as infrastructure.