How privatized is government?

This is a question certain to get a vivid reaction from anybody you ask. It might cost you a friend or two, either by making you look like a wing nut in their eyes or by unsettling them so much that they prefer to get out of your life for good.

Asking this question in a blog post has been a subject of debate around here at the K-Landnews. Being much more cautious than the wording of many of our posts might suggest, we  put the idea into our "maybe box" while collecting more evidence supporting the claim that really any government is much more privatized than we generally think.

The K-Landnews folks like external validation as much as most people, and this time we took our cue from a piece by famously chain-smoking former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in Zeit Online (in German) on intelligence services, the title is Never trust intelligence services. In his long political career from the 1950s to the 1980s, Schmidt was in charge of a state domestic intelligence service, the German military intelligence service, and as a chancellor ultimately responsible for the foreign intelligence service BND (their mini-NSA).

He says he never read BND reports when he ran the government because, among other aspects, the reports were "highly colored by political allegiance".

This statement is our external validation.

Public discourse widely accepts that the major policy makers have an agenda. They are expected to have one, be they the president of the U.S., the opposition leader, the heads of foreign governments.

Of course, everybody is entitled to an opinion, but government workers are generally not supposed to act on their personal agenda in the course of work. The point is, there is a lot of "privatized governing" going on.

The German cop who stops every single kid on a moped around here to verify the technical condition of the moped has the legal authority to do this but why does he use his authority to the fullest while his precinct fellows do not?

He started this after he lost a teenage daughter in a moped accident.

Or take the mid-level official in a procurement job, who said "as long as I have anything to say around here, Company A will not land any contract with us". The man made good on his vow.

You could very likely add numerous examples from your own interaction with officials.

The hard limits of "privatized government" are generally set around corruption and possibly discrimination. As to the rest, that's what makes life interesting.

Do we have any recommendations? Former Chancellor Schmidt's conclusion might be the most practical one: relax.