"The Privatization of Everything" is a book that sneaks up on you. Or at least it snuck up on me. Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian's subtitle should have prepared me: "How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back." I already knew some of the story. But I've never seen it told this way before, spanning such a vast range of examples and offering a compelling alternative vision based in the notion of public good.
The authors do this explicitly by organizing the book's chapters into sections that deal with broad categories of public goods, each with its distinctive pragmatic logic. For example, the section "Public Goods for Life" addresses the dangers of privatizing water, food safety and public health. There are also key thematic perspectives that make sense of the story, starting with the argument that the definition of public goods should belong to, well, the public, rather than being dictated by textbook neoclassical economics, or the simple observation that private companies have interests and incentives that don't necessarily align well with public needs, and can sometimes be entirely at odds.
