roundtable: public goods

roundtable: public goods

public goods

Doug Henwood (dhenwood@panix.com)
Sun, 8 Jan 1995 13:46:41 -0500 

Message-Id: <199501081845.AA00286@panix.com>
Date: Sun, 8 Jan 1995 13:46:41 -0500
To: roundtable@cni.org
From: dhenwood@panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: public goods


Brad Cox said, with characteristic libertarian sweep:
> 
>Public good? Supplied no doubt by such pinnacles of fair-minded
>success as the US Postal Service, Universities, Hospitals, and
>Soviet bureaucracy?
>I suspect Newt has rather different ideas. As do the U.S people,
>thank god.

Let's take these one by one, leaving aside the completely irrelevant 
Soviet bureaucracy (though no doubt this was included as the supposed 
death blow). The postal service does a damn fine job. I publish a 
newsletter and have many many dealings with them, and they are 
excellent. In 9 years, we've had a minimum of things going astray, 
and deliveries made against very high odds. At 32 cents, it's the 
bargain of the industrialized world, too. Of course, if you want to 
pay $10 a package for FedEx, be my guest.

Universities? Haven't public universities educated millions of people 
at reasonable cost, making this a better society and a more productive 
economy? Don't many of us communicate using software written at public 
universities? This is a preposterous assertion - and I got my BA from 
Yale at great expense, so I'm not an interested party here. Outside 
the U.S., almost every university is public, by the way. Oxford and 
Cambridge, even.

Hospitals? Of course if you have generous private insurance and good
connections you can go to an elite private hospital. But many middle 
class people get fine treatment at public university hospitals, and 
much excellent research is also done there. And if you're poor, you 
haven't much alternative to Harlem Hospital or its equivalent 
elsewhere, do you?

Odd that Cox should choose some of the more successful examples of 
public enterprise to make his lame point.

Doug Henwood
[dhenwood@panix.com]
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217
USA
212-874-4020 voice
212-874-3137 fax

[CNI Home Page]