Hinchingbrooke Hospital: Circle to withdraw from contract

Another private provider of public services walks away from a contract - no money to be made. Not quite the answer to all our problems with healthcare after all.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-30740956

There are four factors to production: land, labor, entrepreneurship and capital. Land yields rents; labor yields wages; entrepreneurship yields equity; and capital yields interest.  

Business Dictionary wrote:Resources required for generation of goods or services, generally classified into four major groups:

1. Land (including all natural resources),
2. Labor (including all human resources),
3. Capital (including all man-made resources), and
4. Enterprise (which brings all the previous resources together for production).

These factors are classified also as management, machines, materials, and money (this, the 4 Ms), or other such nomenclature. More recently, knowledge has come to be recognized as distinct from labor, and as a factor of production in its own right.

Two of the four elements are unnecessary and waste resources: entrepreneurship and capital.  Both of these take from the yield of the endeavor, whatever it is.  Those two elements can be duplicated, and thus eliminated by socializing production.  The social unit can cover the entrepreneurship and the capitalization. It embraces innovation and has the resources to expand it.

The lesson to be learned from this is that by privatizing one is adding to the burden of production, not reducing it.  Privatization makes production less efficient.

The way capitalists (promoters of privatization) get around this is by hyping their competitive origins.  They argue privatization > competition > efficiency.  But there is no necessary connection between privatization and efficiency.  Many things yield efficiency, including thought (i.e., a good idea).  Alternatively, privatization in the absence of competition yields less efficiency, not more.  Avarice, in the absence of need, will simply ingest; that is the incentive to monopolize.

One of the greatest examples of this is the US military, said to be the largest socialist enterprise in the world…existing of the people, for the benefit of people, and by the people.  Many, if not most of the innovations in human resources, organization and education have come from the military; and in my own experience, the US military runs the most efficient development and procurement unit (includes research as well as development) in the world.  Privatization is inevitably a step backward.