I do not want to be mean to anyone who liked this book or found value in it. The reason I picked it up is because it was getting hype on Page Bound. I understand that learning about all the aspects of life that our governments have sold away from us is deeply upsetting, and yet. And yet.

I would not recommend this book to anyone. Liberalist non-fiction like this is insidious and disempowering. It uses radical language and bends it to a neoliberalist agenda so that it appears more progressive. It always fears “sliding into socialism”. It never wants to jeopardize the free market. But at it’s core it relies on a circular logic that tells us that, while the government is bad and selling our basic survival needs away, that the government is also the only one who can save us from this. That is the TLDR, but there is so much more to it, so buckle in.

From my lefty perspective, the core concern about privatization should be that no individual, corporation or other powerful entity should control the things humans need to survive, or the basic elements of living a free and fulfilling life: that is food, water, education, housing, and healthcare should be readily available to every human being (not just citizens. I’d also argue they should all be free), and there should not be private roads, railways or militaries or other things that would act as barriers to individual freedom of movement or action. Where governments or other entities control these things, their primary concern should be ensuring the safety of the public and open access to these public assets (with as few barriers to care as possible, I’d argue there should be no barriers at all).

But that is not the concern of this book.

At the core of this book is a deeply neoliberalist ethos. That citizens pay for public services (through their taxes) and that, the government should be able to control and profit from those services, rather than corporations. While the book continually states that public goods should be for everyone and that we have a responsibility to care for each other, this is undermined by the economic framing of every single argument. Free public transit is framed, solely, as a way for people to get to their jobs, as a spark for economic growth. That is what the authors consider to be the public interest. The authors see the cost of privatization, first and foremost, as handing over of what should be government revenue to private corporations (and the resulting higher prices, lower quality, and stifling innovation). The human cost of poisoned drinking water, private prisons, or predatory charter schools that promise people a better life while drowning their “students” in debt, is briefly mentioned, but certainly not the core concern of the book. 



And this is because the book does not clearly define what it actually means by the public or the public interest. The book picks and chooses who constitutes the public at will. Frequently, the book equates the public with the government (except when the government is run by “the bad guys”, Trump, Devos, etc.), even as the authors acknowledge that “the good guys (Obama, Biden) also privatize public services, (and that state and local governments privatize public services as well). So, in this context, public means an idealized, mythologized version of the government that we can trust to protect our public services. There is a constant tension between what the government actually does, and what we imagine it should do, and the authors are disinterested in reckoning with that tension.

Core in this argument is a belief in some idyllic past when we all collectively agreed that the role of the government was to take care of everyone, and decided to create social services and libraries, etc. The authors continuously reference this imagined past. But this view of the state relies on a mythology of government that is demonstrably false. Modern western “democracies” do not have public services because “we collectively decided to take care of each other.” We have these public services because of the work of strikers and activists. We have these social services becuase of the looming “threat” of communism, and radical liberation movements both domestic and international. We have these services becuase the government co-opted the mutual aid work of communities, in order to control who has access to care. Recognizing this gives us the first clue about how to actually fight privatization: we need to start working together and taking care of each other.

But, it is important to remember that a government is not its people. Ideally, in a representative democracy, the government should represent the will of the people, but when discussing privatization, that is obviously not the case. Every act of privatization is a conscious act of the government and its representatives. The book offers a few examples where the public is represented by small groups of concerned activists pushing for change. In one case, activists fought the government for generations to get their representatives to listen to their concerns about food and drug safety and eventually create the FDA. Another example shows bereft citizens in a local city council meeting begging to avoid the privatization of their libraries. Their city council voted to privatize anyway! If this is the only recourse the book believes we have as “the public” to get the government to respond to our concerns, it’s profoundly disempowering. So much political will and effort is expended begging for scraps from disinterested politicians who do not have to listen to the public.

It is in the final pages of the book where we get the third definition of the public that this book offers which is “It’s all of us”. Which begs the question who these authors believe the intended audience for this book is. Who is “us”? It appears to be white, wealthy, upper middle-class people who wield considerable political influence. This book talks a lot about “governance” and how its exercised. There is a corporate tone to it. They are absolutely not talking about the poor, the disenfranchised, non-citizens, prisoners, or any other groups deliberately dispossessed by the neoliberal state.

Which is where another of this book’s core failures becomes most striking. At it’s most foundational, privatization is class warfare. It is a belief that only those who are able to pay for premium services should have access to care, while the rest of us can be left to struggle. But the authors of this book are wholly disinterested in examining the class element at the core of privatization. This ignores how privatization occurs.

Most privatization begins at the top. The wealthy and privileged create a secondary economy of services to isolate themselves from the violence of neoliberal capitalism. This usually looks like private health clinics, private schools, private roads, private neighbourhoods, private transit (like the google shuttles to ensure tech workers can make it to their jobs). This element of privatization is almost wholly ignored in the book. For this book’s authors privatization begins when, starved of resources, public services begin to struggle, which makes them ripe for exploitative privatization from below where governments will sell off these services to offload their costs onto the poor.

Which is where we bump into another core issue with this book: it does a terrible job at actually examining the web of causes that lead to privatization. There are so many reasons, beyond the simplistic math of “the government would make more money if it kept administering this service” that a government may choose to privatize public services. Foremost among these is because it creates a buffer around politicians between the harm they are causing and the public. It avoids accountability (and allows them to be re-elected despite the harm they cause). Privatization also offsets the costs of providing care onto the citizens. Politicians make money from the privatization of public services, through the sale of public assets, stocks and equity, or campaign donations. The PR rhetoric that privatization will be more efficient or affordable is just that, PR. And taking it at face value is at best, hopelessly naive.


But taking CEOs, politicians and other powerful actors at their word about their intentions is something the authors do again and again throughout this book. The book fails to explore the nuance between what a corporation, government, or individual politician states their motivations are, and what their actions reveal their motivations to be. This often leads to the authors characterizing truly bad actors like Betsy Devos as silly little goofs who don’t understand that charter schools are a scam or how businesses work. This is dangerous. Figures like Devos in particular have made fortunes from pretending they do not know the harm they cause (in institutions like Blackrock, AMWAY and charter schools), and they use those fortunes to continue to direct politics on a nearly unimaginable scale. Obscuring their intent is negligent. 


Which brings me, finally, to the altogether unsurprising, but wholly inadequate solutions that this book offers to fight privatization. Small policy changes to patent law. Other silly little policy suggestions that would absolutely be dismantled by any bad faith actors (if they managed to be adopted as actual policy in the first place). And an assertion that the best tool we have is to “believe in the government”, to avoid criticizing it (which the author’s assert lead to insurrections like January 6). And to top it all off: a public outreach campaign to show the public all the innovative technologies that the government has contributed to, to teach the uneducated public about what the government does!

Which, if I might say, is absolute horse shit. Individual people absolutely know what the government does. They know that the government has privatized their water and now rust comes out of their taps. They know that their parents have been kidnapped by ICE and are being held in private detention centres. They know that their schools are underfunded, and the only solution they are being offered is charter school vouchers. Especially the public that is being affected by these actions first-hand. No person relying on tanif cards for their food is surprised to learn that privatization is eating away at their meagre public assistance through fees. This suggestion that that a public information campaign about the role of government offers any true resistance to privatization reiterates the intended audience for this book: people who may be in favour of privatization because they have the means to afford private options. It is absolutely not average citizens.

I struggled a lot through so much of this book, but these conclusions made me catatonic with rage. Often liberalist non-fiction is gaslighting at its core. They use the word “us” so liberally. Tell us that we are the ones privatizing our own care, and muddy the waters regarding who is actually responsible for these actions (the wealthy elites that hold state power). They seek to argue that the people inflicting this harm are also the only people who are able to fix it, that we can overcome this violence by just voting for the right (benevolent wealthy) people to control every aspect of our lives. It relies on a circular logic wherein our elected officials (at every level of government) are selling off public assets, abandoning people made vulnerable by these violent systems, but the solution is to trust the government MORE. This is obviously not the solution.

The real way to fight back against neoliberalism and privatization is pressure from below. It is to create strong networks of care. It is mutual aid. It is meeting each other’s survival needs. It is to care for each other so fiercely that it threatens the neoliberalist state. To create community resources that cannot be sold. We need to take some agency. If this interests you, I really recommend books like Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Service Berry or Pirate Care by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak. They offer different ways to imagine worlds where we take care of each other.

If you are interested in learning more about how public goods and services (and rhetoric) are co-opted by corporations and moneyed interests, I think the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer or Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have a lot more to offer than this book. If you are interested in tracing the roots of Neoliberal Capitalism, I think David Graeber’s Debt has a lot to dig into.

But please, if you are feeling hopeless, don’t read this book. It will only make you feel more hopeless. Remember we have agency. We can take care of each other.

You will learn about the U. S. prison system. You will get angry. You will cry. You will feel love. You will ask questions. You will carry in the back of your mind the message of this book.

Please read it.