Fighting Fire for Profit; R. Bradford

FIGHTING FIRE FOR PROFIT tg Ralp~ Bradford A GOOD friend of mine who was postmaster in a Southern city once scandalized his fellow officeholders by asserting that the Post Office Department could be run more efficiently and at less cost by a private company. Others outside the government have held the same view; and there are those who believe that many of the functions staked out for itself by government could be done better and cheaper by private enterprise. Indeed, there are certain emancipated thinkers who can take even the sacred cow of education by the horns and make a convincing case for getting the government out of education. All such doctrine is, of course, rank heresy to devoted interventionists, and even to many who are not truly interventionists, but who have been reared in the tradi tion that certain things are Hjust naturally" the function of government. Custom, habit, inertia, the pattern of accepting things as they are-all this has conditioned our thinking about such matters.

Even the man who inveighs most loudly against the inefficiencies of the Post Office Department-its anti quated methods, its failure to modernize, its delayed de223 224 RALPH BRADFORD liveries, its rising costs, its annual deficits-is not proof against the habits of a lifetime. If you suggest to him that a private corporation could probably do a better and cheaper job with the mails, he is quite apt to look at you as though he thought you were crazy. ,Certain things, in the general concept, are "just nat urally" a job for government; and if you want to retain your reputation for sanity, you'd better not go around making assertions to the contrary! For instance, if I said to you that the fire fighting function of the modern municipality could be handled cheaply and efficiently and at a profit-by private operators, what would you say in reply? Why-obviously that's the sort of service that offers no attractions or inducements to private initiative. Don't be silly. Can you imagine anybody operating a fire de partment at a profit? Or, if he did, he would have to charge exorbitant rates. That's a job that "just naturally"