Tuesday, April 17th, 11 a.m. to noon Central (9-10 Pacific) on NoLiesRadio.org (archived here a few hours after broadcast).
Guest: Da
vid Macaray, author of “They Want to Privatize the World.” David is a playwright, labor columnist and author (It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor), whose labor and entertainment articles have appeared in such periodicals as the LA Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, NY Press, Beckett Monthly, Utne Reader, as well CounterPunch and CommonDreams.
David’s anti-privatization rant resonates with me. I ran for Congress as a Libertarian, but I don’t agree with the Libertarians who want to privatize everything. To me, “libertarian” means making freedom the basis, i.e. the most deeply-held value, of society. And I think people are far more free when there is lots of public land where they can hike and bike, than where all the land is privatized and fenced off; when roads and paths are toll-free; when they can drink public water rather than bottled water; when they can use bridges and parks and libraries and educational and basic medical care facilities gratis rather than having to pay user fees. In other words, having some form of taxation (or better yet, more-or-less-universal voluntary charity) that covers these things, and putting limits on the domain of homo economicus, is the way to maximize freedom. To me, a world in which everything is privatized – including the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the land we walk on – would be just another Orwellian dystopia. Take THAT, Ayn Rand cultists!
And as a fanatical enemy of bottled water – the perfect symbol of privatization making everything worse – I was glad to see David’s evidence that it’s actually less healthy than tap water.