re: #342 iossarian

By the way, DF, I’m certainly not an absolutist on public/private ownership of industry. There’s definitely a place for private ownership.

On the other hand, in the case of natural monopolies (like rail transport), private ownership makes very little sense. There are other industries where different issues arise with private (for-profit) ownership - education is an obvious one.

The federal government nationalized the railroads for during WW1 and discovered that in practice private ownership made a lot of sense.

For-profit private educational enterprises are problematic because of the ease of fraud. A railroad cannot very well pretend that it shipped your goods. Either they got there or they didn’t. A school can pretend it trained you. The school is in charge not only of the instruction but the evaluation.

There is a lot of fraud in education. It’s not limited to private schools; Atlanta comes to mind. And then there’s all the courses of study that lead nowhere.

There’s also the matter of plain old technical schooling. What can you say when somebody who took calculus I and got a B at school X cannot find the derivative of x^3?

School X is handing out grades that lack any foundation in reality. Whether that’s fraud in the criminal sense is iffy, but fraud it is. Tuition has been paid, and instruction that gets the student somewhere has not been delivered in exchange.

But having the school be private, and for profit, adds fuel to the fires of fraud. There’s just more incentive.