A little editing for appearance, not content

Message to L-Hack:

I took the liberty of editing your post, since the long links were pushing the right-side banner off the page. I've left the links, just changed the text in between the tags.

To all our loyal readers:

Despite what someone else on this site will tell you, academics are not lazy. If we are, then why am I so tired?

I've been finishing up papers for my seminars, and getting ready for finals, so the left voice isn't going to be heard for a little bit.

L-Hack is reading Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships by E.S. Savas right now, and I just finished a critique of that book, comparing it to some of the work done by Donald Kettl in Sharing Power: Public Governance and Private Markets. It should make for some good debate in a couple weeks.

Something hit me the other night as I was working on this paper. For the better part of the discussion, it was a debate between competition versus conquering asymmetrical information as the key to successful privatization. I wanted to incorporate some other perspectives into my analysis, and I was thinking about an article by Matthew Crenson about Popular and Personal Democracy.

As I'm writing about how things like vouchers reduce the need or opportuntity for collective action, I felt guilty. How could I deviate from the economic discussion? Then it hit me - why can't a public administration scholar, a political scientist, talk about citizens, government, and roles in society? In fact, why aren't more of us talking about it?

I've been working with a friend on a lecture about using the tools of economics as a part of Critical Race Theory, and he said it - it's all about economics now. We've put the virtue of the free market over everything else, without question or criticism. Forget about values like citizen participation and collective action - if we deny market choice to citizens, the goals of our government are misplaced!

I'm going to have more to say about this in the coming months...